I won't talk much about the Carve reading, since others have already done so, apart from saying that it was a very warm vibe and some very great work was read. It was a pleasure to read with some of my closest cohorts and comrades and nice to do so in New York. Afterward we went to a bar which looked like the Zinc Bar but wasn't because it was in Chelsea. It's similarity to the Zinc Bar reminded me of the bars in Boston, all of which are some variation of the Irish pub or a sports bar, sort of repetitions of a theme. But in this instance, it was a different theme.

The next day at UDP was spent preparing for a launch party for a cultural studies/theory journal that an affiliate of UDP is putting out.

Immediately prior to the party, I went to a play put on by the National Theater of the United States of America, also located in the NEST space, called "What's on My Head," which was truly amazing. Sort of a bowdlerization of U.S. History done in the form of a kind of sinister game show. It was really funny and exquisitely produced. The audience sat on a riser which was mounted on these huge casters which the cast members who were offstage would push around. There was a very vaudeville-esque sense mixed with a certain perversity. A kind of songless musical for nihilists...

Following the play, an army of Ivy-league theory types and NYC mainstream literati descended on the space to huddle around the protype issue of "N+1." Which resulted in a weird mix of people, to say the least. Overall, a fun if slightly voyeuristic-seeming evening. Vaguely reminiscent of certain parties I attended with a certain Ivy-league type who will remain nameless, which I found to be somewhat disconcerting and indeed there were dopplegangers of said acquaintance there, but the $1 beers pretty much made the whole thing bearable.

Saturday afternoon was spent assembling copies of 6x6 #8 and also letterpressing more City/Temple covers. It was nice to meet some other 6x6 people, as well as a few other UDP people I'd never met before. In the afternoon I attended a bilingual reading at the Bowery Poetry Club: Jen Hofer reading with Myriam Moscona. Hofer's translations are really amazing, and the work that Moscona read from, "Ivory Black," was really interesting. The Mexican rendering of postmodernism is pretty interesting, and not as bloodless as alot of American pomo stuff I've come across. I'm probably a good audience for this, given my pomo leanings but my unwillingness to abandon "outmoded" Romantic tropes entirely. It makes we wonder though, if what's happened here is a kind of U.S.-ization of postmodernism, subtlely altering the concepts until they somehow fit into the sociocultural map of our intellectual and cultural institutions; sort of like what happened with concepts like...say...democracy or liberty?

After the reading I went to another play, this time a workshop rendering of Michael McLure's verse play "VCTMS," at the Medicine Show Theatre a kind of retelling of the Electra myth through the lens of marxism and existentialism. Given that it was a workshop performance, there were no costumes or sets per se, but the actors and actresses sort of occupied these three tiers based on the implied class-structure of the play. It was a very visceral and stripped-down retelling of the myth, and I found it to be quite moving. Seeing actual actresses and actors do poetic verse made me excited about the concept of poetic drama. There seemed to be something organic about the way that actual moving bodies interacted with the words themselves, even if in this case they were just sitting in chairs or on the floor interacting with each other. It makes me think about my own sense of disembodiment I feel in my work and in general. Perhaps the answer to reinhabiting the corporeal is not necessarily by trying to reinhabit my own body, but the bodies of others by way of dramatic form. It is a kind of possesion of a sort, the way the words can move through another persons body, through their mind. McLure himself seemed pretty ecstatic seeing his own work channeled physically through others.

It is nice to go and see theater stuff in NYC, as it's not something I get much of a chance to do here. I'm not sure if that is because there's not much going on, or because I just don't know where to look for it. Most likely the latter.

On Monday night I gave what was probably one of my favorite readings to date, along with Genya Turovskaya at a place called Casper Jones Cafe in Parkslope, Brooklyn. For no reason specifically, other than the confluence of the work I read, the aesthetic environment of the place itself and the people present. Casper Jones is a really cozy space, sort of upscale but not entirely pretentious, the resident staff were really nice and there were these cool white fuzzy bricks on the walls. I'm not sure how to describe it other than that. Overall, the vibe was really good, there were not a ton of people there, but there were some new faces, and people who I don't think have seen me give a full reading before... And Genya's work was exquisite and seemed to accompany mine pretty well. Afterward, we all went to a really great restaraunt called Nana where I got some of the best salty spicy fried squid I've had to date. Outside the back window of the restaurant there was this amazing ghost-clock formed by projecting light through a smaller clock, thus making a big sort of shadow-clock on the wall. A fitting end to the reading, I think.

And now I'm back here.


Yup.

But looking forward to some great readings later on in the week.