Friday, April 29, 2011

dOCUMENTA 13 : Featuring Publications by Post-Apollo Authors: Etel Adnan & Jalal Toufic




“100 Notes – 100 Thoughts.” Now available: The first 17 notebooks in both printed and e-book editions

As a prelude to the 2012 exhibition, dOCUMENTA (13) and Hatje Cantz have initiated a series of publications driven by the logic of the mind-at-work, presenting, writing, and drawing scenarios that point outside the normative bounds of academic text production. In the form of facsimiles of existing notebooks, commissioned essays, collaborations between artists and writers, and conversations, they present models of connection-making between the private and the public, between the pre-stage of intuitions, the naming of ideas, and the key-chain of arguments that provide the reader with a singular insight into working methods. The series is formed through interconnections, so that the notebooks could be described as an “interregnum,” a temporary rupture in discursive intelligence; they do not direct us towards reason as such, but towards a different understanding of the role of consciousness. They appear in three different formats (A6, A5, B5) and they are between 16 to 48 pages long. The contributors come from various fields such as art, science, philosophy and psychology, anthropology, political theory, literature studies, and poetry.

They include Etel Adnan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Péter György, Emily Jacir, Susan Buck-Morss, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, Peter L. Galison, Erkki Kurenniemi, Lars Bang Larsen, György Lukács, Christoph Menke, Paul Ryan, Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri, Vandana Shiva, G. M. Tamás, Michael Taussig, Jalal Toufic, Ian Wallace, and Lawrence Weiner. Commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13)’s Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev together with Agent, Member of Core Group, and Head of Department Chus Martínez, this series is edited by Head of Publications, Bettina Funcke. The “100 Notes – 100 Thoughts” series will be launched at various places and in various moments, each accompanied by a discussion on the nature and the aim of this publishing project.



006: Etel Adnan : The Cost for Love We Are not Willing to Pay


In her poetic reflection, artist, poet, and essayist Etel Adnan (*1925) describes various forms of love: the love for ideas, for God, for things, and for nature. However, today we have distanced ourselves from a higher form of love that drove Nietzsche into madness and the Islamic mystic al-Hallaj into martyrdom. The love for nature, which Adnan describes through her own experience, even seems to have given way to contempt—how else could the ecological catastrophe toward which we are steering be explained? The price to stop it would be too high, as it would involve a radical change in our way of life—similar to the experience of conventional love between two people, which involves such intensity only a few are ready to endure it.

English/German
20 pp., 1 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2855-3
E-Book
c. € 4,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3035-8

Etel was born in 1925 in Beirut and lives in Sausalito, Cal., and Paris. She studied literature at the Sorbonne, Paris, at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., and Berkeley University. In 1984, she worked with Robert Wilson on his opera CIVILwarS and has exhibited internationally. Her recent publications include Master of the Eclipse (2009), Seasons (2008), In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), and In/somnia (2002). 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts No. 006: The Cost for Love We Are Not Willing to Pay photo: Franck Guérin, 2011



Jalal Toufic: Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”—Angelically

In the second edition of his book (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (2003), Jalal Toufic notes: “I was for years concerned with schizophrenia and with schizophrenics, who appeared in my Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green, 1995; and I am now interested in ‘the little girl,’ whom I expect to appear in my coming vampire film. . . . At one level, the Thirteenth Series in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, 1969, ‘The Schizophrenic and the Little Girl,’ can thus be retrospectively viewed as a program for the work of a decade on my part.” In this new essay, he writes on the portrait of the pubescent girl, including in Poe’s “The Oval Portrait.” “The successful portrait of a pubescent girl is not a rite of passage but a rite of non-passage; what needs a rite is not passage, which is the natural state (at least for historical societies), but non-passage, the radical differentiation between the before, in this case a pubescent girl, and the after, a woman.” From the portrait of the pubescent girl, Toufic moves to the portrait in general and its paradigmatic relation to the angel; thus the title of this notebook: Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”—Angelically. — Most of Jalal Toufic’s books are available for download as PDF files at his website: www.jalaltoufic.com > .

English/German
24 pp., 1 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2860-7
E-Book
c. € 4,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3040-2

Jalal Toufic, writer, artist Born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad, Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He is the author of, among other books, Graziella: The Corrected Edition (2009), The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster
(2009), Undeserving Lebanon (2007), Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell
You (2005), Forthcoming (2000), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), and Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003). Most of his books are available for download as PDF files at his website www.jalaltoufic.com. He is a guest of the 2011 Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD. 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts No. 011: Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”—Angelically Welcome to the info section of the dOCUMENTA (13) website. ... http://d13.documenta.de/panorama/#participants/participants/jala...
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For more information about dOCUMENTA 13 visit their website.

Monday, April 11, 2011

WINNERS!


The Post-Apollo Press' very own MARIBOR won the 2011 Northern California Book Award (NCBA) for best Poetry Translation this Sunday!!!

The Northern California Book Awards were established by NCBR (formerly the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, or BABRA) in 1981 to honor the work of northern California writers and recognize exceptional service in the field of literature here in northern California. They are co-sponsored by Poetry Flash, the Center for the Art of Translation, the San Francisco Public Library, the Friends of the SF Library, the Mechanics Institute, and PEN West. The awards recognize excellence in newly published fiction, non-fiction, poetry, translation, and children's literature. The Translation Awards are sponsored by the Center for the Art of Translation.


Heartfelt CONGRATULATIONS to Maribor's translators, John Sakkis & Angelos Sakkis. This award represents much deserved recognition of their refreshing and contemporary approach to their work with poet Demosthenes Agrafiotis.

You can read more about Maribor here at our website.

You can order your own copy of Maribor, directly from us by by:
email : postapollo@earthlink.net
phone : (415) 332-1458
fax : (415) 332-8045
mail : 35 Marie St., Sausalito, CA 94965

Or online via our fantastic distributor, Small Press Distribution.

Friday, April 8, 2011

The Phenomena Pre-Publication Special Offer from Your Two Favorite Small Presses : Litmus Press and The Post-Apollo Press.




In 2010 both Litmus Press and The Post-Apollo Press had the honor of working with poet Leslie Scalapino on what were, sadly, to be her last two books. The first, an epic work of prose poetry, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, published in August, 2010 by The Post-Apollo Press and now, forthcoming May 2011 from Litmus Press, a new and expanded edition of How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (originally published by Potes & Poets in 1989). This new version includes twenty-three new essays (only three of which have been published in previous collections) and seven additional poetic pieces.

During the Month of April take advantage of this pre-release deal by ordering both titles How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (in advance of its publication in May) and The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom via Litmus Press for only $30*. Through this deal, you’ll be buying Dihedrons and getting Phenomena for $1. Such a deal!

Checks payable to Ether Sea Projects, Inc may be sent to:

Litmus Press
925 Bergen St. #405
Brooklyn, NY 11238

Please include a printout of the announcement, or write "Phenomena Pre-Pub Deal" on the memo line of check.

*Domestic orders add $3 shipping; international orders add $10 shipping.

You can also follow this deal on Facebook


How Phenomena Appear to Unfold
Leslie Scalapino
May 2011 • ISBN: 978-1-933959-12-2 • $24
Litmus Press

In “Eco-logic in Writing” one of many brilliant essay-talks in this volume, Leslie Scalapino asks, “Seeing at the moment of, or at the time of, writing, what difference does one’s living make?” What more crucial question for those concerned not only with writing but with poethics: composing words into a socially conscious wager … Scalapino’s Steinian strategy of recomposing the vision of one’s times, “altering oneself and altering negative social formation,” is her artfully problematized project of writing ourselves into a better future …
Joan Retallack

Praise for the 1989 edition:

“Where critics used to debate, as if it were a real thing, a difference between form and content, so now they would separate "“theory” from “practice,” and thus divide a poet from his or her own intentions and poetry from its motives. But in fact poetic language might be precisely a thinking about thinking, a form of introspection and inspection within the unarrested momentum of experience, that makes the polarization of theory and practice as irrelevant as that of form and content, mentality and physicality, art and reality.

Leslie Scalapino is one of a certain number of contemporary poets who have engaged in the struggle, not against distinctions but against the reification of false oppositions … these essays (works) are an essential testament to poetry and to its embodiment and the book is an important contribution to the singularity and wholeness of her project.” Lyn Hejinian



The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom
Leslie Scalapino
August 2010 • ISBN: 978-0942996-72 • $29

Described by the author as referencing a cyber Alice in Wonderland … composed by process of alexia, (word blindness) : unknown words were chosen by leafing through Webster’s Dictionary at random; these generate characters and events that cohere as a sci-fi novel in which the characters are apparently divided from their senses . . . ; by virtue of this dysaphic quality they act to heal mind-body split visibly demonstrated by the dihedrons and the gazelle-dihedrals, humanlike creatures — who inhabit the emerald dark . . .

The Divine Comedy for our age, with, if one could say, more humanity and
more derision.
Etel Adnan

This is not a poem or a story but a mystical vision.
Fanny Howe

Scalapino’s jewel book that has come out of the spagyric hinterlands of
purest imagination. . . . it zooms with the elegance of a gazelle or a wolf . . .
Virginia Woolf.
Michael McClure

Friday, April 1, 2011

Cross Cultural Poetics : An Interview with Demosthenes Agrafiotis

Demosthenes Agrafiotis, author Maribor (Post-Apollo, 2010) and Chinese Notebook (Ugly Duckling, 2011) in conversation with host Leonard Schwartz on the Cross Cultural Poetics radio program.

Demosthenes reads two poems aloud from Maribor in the original Greek, followed by readings in English by Leonard Schwartz and discusses the process of translation through his work with translators Angelos Sakkis and John Sakkis.

A true delight!

Listen at Penn Sound : http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/XCP.php