2 Events & 2 Post-Apollo Poets Next week!

N E X T T U E S D A Y 10/12:
Denis Newman (Post-Apollo Poet Extraorinaire) & Aaron Belz
READING @ 7pm
BookShop West Portal
80 West Portal Ave
San Francisco, CA 94127-1304











Denise Newman is a San Francisco poet and translator whose two previous collections are Wild Goods and Human Forest. Her latest book, The New Make Believe, is, according to poet Norman Fischer, "more haunting than ever, and as needful of contemplation." Newman, who teaches creative writing at the California College of the Arts, is a staff editor at Five Fingers Review, and has been a Djerassi Resident Artist. Her translation of The Painted Room by the Danish poet Inger Christensen was published in 2000 by The Harvill Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Denver Quarterly, Volt, apex of the M, New American Writing, and ZYZZYVA. For the past decade, she has been collaborating with composers, providing lyrics for choral works.


N E X T W E E K E N D : 10/16-17

Etel Adnan & Serpentine Map Marathon
Saturday and Sunday
16 – 17 October

In London: Etel Adnan will give a reading as part of the Serpentine Gallery's "Serpentine Maps Marathon" :
Maps for the 21st Century is an ambitious two-day event bringing together over 50 extraordinary artists, poets, writers, philosophers, scholars, musicians, architects, designers and scientists to showcase possible maps for the coming decade. Read more about the event here.

Etel Adnan's Paintings at Frieze Art Fair 14-17 October 2010

Semler Sfeir Gallery will exhibit paintings by Etel Adnan at the Frieze Art Fair this October (14-17) in London. (See below for more info).

Etel also wrote to let us know that she will participate in a poetry marathon in London on the 16th & 17th of that October as well.

The eighth edition of the leading international contemporary art fair, sponsored by Deutshce Bank, takes place in London's Regent's Park from 14-17 October 2010.

World's top contemporary art galleries
173 of the world's most exciting contemporary art galleries, representing 29 countries, will present new work by over 1,000 of the world's most innovative artists at Frieze Art Fair.

Galleries new to the main section of the fair include: Bortolami, New York (USA); Pilar Corrias, London (UK); Elizabeth Dee, New York (USA); Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (Belgium); Michael Lett, Auckland (New Zealand).

The successful introduction of Frame, dedicated to galleries under six years old showing solo artist presentations, sees its return in 2010. Frame is supported by Cos. The Frame galleries' selection has been advised by curators Cecilia Alemani and Daniel Baumann.

A listing of all the galleries with work that they are showing at the fair will be online in a new 'Art Finder' section of the Frieze Art Fair website. friezeartfair.com

Exciting News from Paris!

Simone and Etel have been based in Paris for the past several months, excepting jaunts to Beirut, Berlin and most recently, London where Etel gave a reading at The Serpentine gallery of which we hope to have photos to share soon. The most recent big news from Paris however, is that The Despalles Editions, based in Meinz and Paris will publish an excerpt of Etel Adnan's "Seasons". The section "Spring" will be published as a special de luxe edition with wood engravings by german artist, Johannes Strugalla, and the book will be presented at the upcoming Frankfurt Bookfair.


Johannes Strugalla working on the engravings for Seasons:




























Here is an excerpt from a critical essay by Mark Grimes on Seasons titled "Listen to Etel Adnan", published in a 2009 issue of Al Jadid Magazine:

Imagine a movie screen larger than her native country of Lebanon, positioned in the sky above those timeless cedars, and revealing in anguishing replay the war of 1982. Shatila? Sabra? Again, perhaps. but, we do want a sense of logic, a sense of continuity, in what we read. And this is not to be the case with Etel Adnan's Seasons. No. We are to enter an exquisitely imagined and private world, where "The oak tree is growing with anxiety," and "No object can compete with a sound's intimacy."

Stay tuned for more news from Sausalito, Paris, New York, Beirut and beyond.

Demosthenes Agrafiotis reads in New York!

Contemporary Greek poet, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, author of Post-Apollo's "Maribor" will be giving a reading at Poet's House in New York to celebrate the release of his newest book "Chinese Notebook", which was also translated by John & Angelos Sakkis. We hope to get him out to the West Coast for a Bay Area reading soon!

Here's what Demosethenes has to say (swiped from translator John Sakkis' blog)

***

Dear friends
from Demothenes...

"The Ugly Duckling Press will publish my book "Chinese notebook" in september 2010.
We are going to celebrate the publication with a poetry action in the POETS HOUSE in NY
(see site below),on 6th of October ,at 07.00 pm.
John Sakkis (one of the translators -the other translator is Angelos Sakkis) will be present.
The event includes :video projections,readings in greek,english,french,performance,debate..
I will be happy to invite you for this <>.
If you distribute this information to your friends and collegues,I will be extremely grateful.
I will be in NY from the 2nd until the 10th of October .
I will stay in Brooklyn .
Thanks in advance for your attention.
all the best
da"

Upcoming Events Celebrating the Life and Work of Leslie Scalapino

November 16th, Dixon Place
New York City
Flow-Winged Crocodile
A play by Leslie Scalapino
Directed by Fiona Templeton
Performed by The Relationship

December 3rd, UC Berkeley, Maude Fife Room
Berkeley, CA
Bay Area Memorial Reading for Leslie Scalapino
*Simone plans to contribute to the evening with a short reading.

December 4th, Small Press Traffic
San Francisco, CA
Celebration of Leslie Scalapino's plays

December 21st-22nd, ODC Theater
San Francisco, CA
Flow-Winged Crocodile
Directed by Fiona Templeton
Performed by The Relationship

*If you haven't had a chance to check out the extensive and inspiring 4 Day Tribute to Leslie Scalapino happening over at Delirious Hem, we highly, highly recommend you do.

Jalal Toufic Now Available Online

For the past year or so we at The Post-Apollo Press have been plum OUT of two of Jalal Toufic's most engaging and sought after novels: Vampires and Undying Love, or Love Dies. We hope to be able to reprint both books in the future, but unfortunately, do not have the means do so just yet. In the meantime, there is good news: Jalal Toufic has made several of his publications including Vampires and Undying Love, or Love Dies available for download as pdfs on his website JalalToufic.com. Hooray!

I (Lindsey Boldt, assistant editor) recently read Toufic's Two or Three Things I'm Dying to Tell You, which by the bye, is one of the most frustrating,entertaining and mind shuffling works of cross-genre criticism I have ever encountered. Toufic's retelling of Hitchcock's Rear Window and Vertigo as a mashup titled "Rear Window Vertigo", was a highlight definitely worth the price of admission. Since then I have been hot to read his other works but we honestly sold the very last copies in the office! Thank you to Jalal Toufic for generously sharing his work!

Stay tuned for reprints from Post-Apollo.

The Post-Apollo Press is Pleased to Announce:

Leslie Scalapino’s Masterpiece. . .

The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom

Poetry 176pgs $29.00 ISBN: 978-0942996-72-2

On The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom
by Leslie Scalapino

The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, in short chapters usually not more than a page or half page, was composed by process of alexia, word-blindness: unknown words were chosen by randomly leafing through Webster’s Dictionary; these generate characters and events that cohere as a sci-fi novel in which the characters are apparently divided from their senses (said to be dysaphic, they are seemingly without tactile senses, without memory or seeing—though they are also said to see and touch); by virtue of this dysaphic quality they act to heal mind-body split visibly demonstrated by the dihedrons and the gazelle-dihedrals, humanlike creatures with structures opened to show their organs and muscles—who inhabit the emerald dark apparently either cyber or real space. These umbra creatures have been affected by ‘idea’ being the goal and description of everything, divided from ‘being’ itself.

The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom is an endless landscape in which new characters arising from the words, with their own lives and actions that briefly refer to outside events and history (such as Sara Palin, one of the characters for an instant), access spatial-sound openings, tactile and aural sensations, the conception being that we’ve been split distorted, cut off from our present-future-past, time acknowledged as really non-existent as we conventionally define it. The characters are particularly the abandoned orphan girls (left by parents or placed in orphanages as is occurring at present in China and India but here location is not specified, is as if a futuristic everywhere), millions of whom stream through the sci-fi realms in which horses roam as in Mongolia. Leafing through the dictionary I ran across the two words “base runner”—from this, a main character arose, the base runner who is trapped in an emerald dark freezing space where he runs to reach widely separated bases, no one else present in the game from which he can’t depart (if he does he will be killed); he’s bound apparently in a cyber program possibly gulag from which terrorist actions arise or are reflected. One such event, the attack on Mumbai, is the origin and connection of all the events of the book. The avatars of the base runner are an eagle and an octopus; the latter frees the base runner by making love to a woman (another main character named the distaffer) as she is swimming in the sea after her plane with a load of orphans has crashed into the sea. The octopus and the woman “come” allowing the base runner to come to them breaking through from the emerald dark. The dihedrons (seen only sideways, they arrive without appearing to move) and the gazelle-dihedrals (different manifestation of the same creature but this version zooms only forward) are completely opened in the sense that their organs-musculature-skeletons are simultaneously displayed to be literally outside and inside at once. These creatures are either protective or threatening, akin to Tantric Buddhist figures; they are present while the human characters catch on fire in the emerald zone, the living people protected by their avatars (an octopus, a Silvertip grizzly, a white wolf-dog, an eagle).

The characters alter by their experience. Some who are the abandoned girl-orphans growing up become manifestations of characters (loosely conceived) from Greek myths. One main character is “the deb” (the debutant) who is the daughter of a slut named Chrysanthemum (a manifestation of a fiery red Mongolian wrathful deity, a figure of enlightenment); given the hardship of having such a mother, the daughter grows up to be Artemis whose avatars are a Silvertip grizzly and the Silver Wattle Tree. Another main character is a child, one of the abandoned girl-orphans, who grows up to be Venus/Aphrodite (also Venus Williams, the tennis champ). One minor character is Hera, a harridan who is abusive to one of the abandoned orphans.

The intent of this work is free rein of the imagination, as if ‘on a run’ pushing it as far as can be to break through—to have it ‘unite’ with a sense of being real. The intent is also that one as reader have the sense of seeing one’s separation from one’s own senses in living in our society—as our separation from paradise—and as reading, to have even a tactile as well as mental sense of union with that paradise. Though since it is real, paradise as the book’s reality includes also terrifying events of the actual world (as well as daily events, sometimes humorous).

The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom contains images by Jess, Masami Teraoka, and Kiki Smith. Images by Jess and Masami Teraoka (an octopus sucking a woman) are part of the meaning of the text, as if the images are memories of events in the lives of the characters (who have only single memories arising occasionally, or are devoid of memories until these begin to break through). Kiki Smith has given permission to use images from her Spinster Series, included as part of my text. Her figure of a girl (from her already existing series) is used as a reference to a figure of a girl in the emerald dark. The images by these artists are thus real events already existing outside, already experienced in the text independently, neither illustrating the other—verifying each other as part of a huge background of sensory events.

The inside of action and of being in these actions at the same time—have the tactile sense that there is no present even seeing there in its midst experiencing sensations. The characters, the deb (debutant), the distaffer, and the base runner, with their avatars—so they have more than one manifestation at once—exist alongside and somehow programmed in relation to real-time events: a recent terrorist attacks on a cricket team and the recent attack on Mumbai (the two events conflated as if one). Akin to Henry Darger’s endless landscapes, narrative is from the outside always—at the same time the intent is for the writing to be the sensation of having/being other people’s sensations as well as non-human, that of flowers—not only to have the pleasure of this vivid life but the sense of not struggling for future.

This work, possibly referencing a cyber Alice in Wonderland is based in the sound of words intended to make a sensory realm, as if the characters while not having senses, have these given to them as the writing being all of the senses.


May 2010
Oakland, CA