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A complete google image voyage, to explicate & celebrate the arrival of the reprint of d.a.levy's ukanhavyrfuckinciti bak. in a new edition of 400, from Russell Salamon:

NYArtBookFair

Yesterday (Friday) I took in the first day of this year's NYArtBookFair with pal Lawrence Giffin. The thing is like a high-end, poopless AWP. The rate of interesting people per square foot is also significantly higher than that of AWP (which is in turn way higher than any ol' place). I ran into friend Thomas Evans & chatted nicely while looking at a one-of-a-kind Ian Hamilton Finlay piece. Thomas mentioned that he had heard about a long lost (or something like that) Clark Coolidge piece that featured pages rolled up inside of a shoe. At the Information as Material booth, I met both Nick Thurston & Jarrod Fowler, picking up Thurston's lastest, Historia Abscondita, a treatment of a certain portion of Nietzsche's The Gay Science. Jarrod alerted me that there may be a possible reprint on the way to get the cover colors just right, which may make the version I scooped rare in the future, which tickles me all over. At another table I scored Partially Built Woodshed, which is an attractive, smallish volume on Robert Smithson printed on blue, uncut pages. The fetching operator of the Semiotext(e)/Autonomedia booth had to be told twice that I was a pushover & would buy anything recommended me. I emerged with a Science Fiction anthology with a mechanical peepee flipbook built in to the lower edges of each page, a work from the Midnight Notes Collective entitled Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War 1973-1992, Richard Kempton's Provo: Amsterdam's Anarchist Revolt, along with the Critical Art Ensemble's Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, and New Eugenic Consciousness & finally Pure War from Virilio & Lotringer.


Other finds include Jeremy Shaw's DMT art/experiment/experience book-o'-the-substance courtesy of the Presentation House Gallery & Projectile Publishing. The book is all black & (mostly) white & I can already see the future fingersmudgeprints that will decorate it's covers & pages. Rounding out the acquisitions are Scott McCarney's Index to The Encyclopedia, a handsome red-leathery, gold-stampy thing from Smart Books, & a small colorful duct-tape-bound volume State of the Union also by McCarney. The edition of 100 accompanies anagrams of its title along with close-up still images of the speaker, from the 2003 address.



After the fair promptly ended at 7 (there were suited men with walkie talkies telling us to scram) Lawrence & I accompanied Jarrod, Nick, Rob Fitterman & new friends Karriem & Ammiel (sorry, no last names for now) for Korean dindin & then we were joined by Kenny Goldsmith for drinks at a posh place called Keens Chophouse. Rob told us that it was at Keens where Abe Lincoln hung out a day or two before he caught a bad one.

Latinos need not be frightened by the canyon

Everyone is happy & swimming buh-cause a new Rodefer item found it's way home, this a three way joint project (similar to Writing Out of Character) with Geoff Ward & Ian Patterson. Translations of Rilke. Elegies. It is limited to 200 copies & curiously features no binding. It seems ripe for staples but I must say that I applaud the nude decision.


The first is by Geoff, the fourth by Ian, the sixth by Stephen. Published by Peter Riley, printed by Michael Coles.

New VS: EoD

Happily, there is a new Viktor Shklovsky title out from Dalky Archive: Energy of Delusion. & while it is true that not each of Viktor's works is as magically affective as Third Factory, this volume seems more than a little promising, as Dalkey reports that V worked on it for about, oh, three decades, a timeframe similar to William Gass's magnum The Tunnel.


This is, like Theory of Prose, a critical work, but the Dalkey description uses the good phrase "writing that roams" when describing the book, which should turn any Shklovsky fan on something nice. This is the first time the book will be published in English; it is somewhat confounding but not-that-confounding when you realize that a sizable chunk of VS' work has yet to make it out of the mothertongue. The text focuses of the works of Tolstoy, but if we're lucky that will be only half the battle, & Viktor shall shine like the halogen of the future he never saw. Also, perhaps this new publication indicates that Dalkey is on track after all, despite the recent Review of Contemporary Fiction hijinks.