Fabien Chalon

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Gis a Job

Robert Sheppard's blog:

The main ongoing tragedy in British poetry, to my mind, remains the unquestioned connection between publishing and poetry, in some minds. Too many young poets seek a career (sadly, or laughably) from the mainstream, one that seems afforded by the capital which publication - vindication - by Salt, or Faber, seems to accord. The main thing should be the composition of the poem. Poems should be read, and appreciated, regardless of, and indeed, apart from, their publisher.

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The Third Presidential Debate (Crib Notes)

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=cc8atgWqefc] Žižek:

Joseph Stiglitz recently wrote that, although there is a growing consensus among economists that any bailout based on Henry Paulson’s plan won’t work, ‘it is impossible for politicians to do nothing in such a crisis. So we may have to pray that an agreement crafted with the toxic mix of special interests, misguided economics and right-wing ideologies that produced the crisis can somehow produce a rescue plan that works – or whose failure doesn’t do too much damage.’ He’s right: since markets are effectively based on beliefs (even beliefs about other people’s beliefs), how the markets react to the bailout depends not only on its real consequences, but on the belief of the markets in the plan’s efficiency. The bailout may work even if it is economically wrong.

  Possible, by Jonathan Hoefler. Joe the Plumber. Joe the Plumber.

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The "Commons"

Sean Bonney:

My long poem The "Commons", which has been appearing here throughout the summer, is now available to download as a pdf. Go to this place here and follow the instructions. Don't worry, its completely safe.

I've been following the construction of this in fragments and uniforms for the last few months. Going to get stuck in and let yous alls knows whats Is thinks.

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Tate Bunk Beds

200 of 'em. Seriously.

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Local Colour

Local Colour is a page–by–page interpretation of Paul Auster’s 72–page novella Ghosts.... With Local Colour, Canadian conceptual novelist and visual artist derek beaulieu has removed the entirety of Auster’s text, leaving only chromatic words—proper nouns or not—spread across the page as dollops of paint on a palette.

See Crg Hill for details.

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Goode Klinker Yah

Harry Gilonis (and Jow Lindsay via synchronicity) point to the event below tonight: Chris Goode Klinker Maggie's Bar (not farm) 100 Stoke Newington Church St 8.30 doors open for 9ish £5/£3 conc. Might be connected to an Openned event in some kind of synchronous waylay.

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Outage

You may have experienced an outage today preventing access to Openned through the openned.com address. This has now been resolved and should be the last time such an outage occurs. Apologies for this. On a related note, mice like lemon sherbet more than cheese.

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for godot's sake

Looks like 'Issue 1' by the team at for godot, has taken on an ant-in-the-magnifying-glass significance, or non-significance (but still significant enough to post about its non-significance). Here is an excellent summary of what has happened so far, along with some salient commentary on the whole saga. For context before we continue, see DBC, Silliman (along with the comment thread), a couple of posts by Jow Lindsay, and one by farfalla press. You get the idea.  So, the for godot team have issued a polite clarification. Stephen McLaughlin explains:

I expected its size, format, and (to my eye) clearly algorithmically generated content to make our intentions clear.

Shocking, I know. For instance, let's attribute some kind of condition of irreparable reputational fatigue to what is featured in this 'issue'. The name 'issue' for starters implies that after the first 4000 poets there's likely to be another 4000 poets. So every every poet who's any poet (my name is not, sadly, on the list) is going to be published with a, let's call it 'fake' work against their name. That's if we can even class that list as names, which in one sense they are, but in another sense they are flarf procedure. Also, the people on this list are not Stephen King, or Michael Crichton, or Danielle Steele, or JK Rowling. They have a specific, proactive audience that seeks out their work or work like it, discovering new work through association, recommendation and research. A person who knows the work of Silliman is going to deduce, assuming they take it at face value, that an anthology of 4000 poets is going to be both poorly edited and of an overall mediocre standard at best, through sheer volume. Even if they were to seek out the work of Silliman in this publication, they would recognise that it was not his. If they were new to Silliman's poetry, the chance of them stumbling across his name as one of 4000 in an anthology, and then choosing to read that over the Google search results which have his work isolated, on web pages, for easy reading, is going to be incredibly slim. There is no way this publication could adversely affect any of the names on the list. Well, one way. I've read a lot of negative reaction to this publication. The polite clarification by the publishers alone is indication of how offended some have been. How can people of such obvious intelligence, at least in their chosen field, find time to be taken aback by a project that is - while its merits as a work of poetry can be debated - so... harmless?

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VISPO Gallery

Curated by C. Merhl Bennett. Above image by Jeffersen Hansen. Warning: Navigating off the page and back into the Mad Hatters' Review will result in hideous muzak. via Crg Hill

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