September 2017 – Eugene Lim

Revisiting that which can’t be revisited: Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham sits very high in my personal pantheon. In 2011 we got tickets to his company’s final performances. These were big, moving nights for us — even as I’ve always found it hard to describe what is so emotionally moving about his work. I wrestled with this and wrote about it for the Paris Review’s “Revisited” series.

…So even prior to (or outside of) the physical dance, there was already a parallel conceptual-art project that was an intense durational-performance work, an almost literal dance with death, a mourning ritual, an explosion of life within death, and an enlightened embracing and letting go of time all at once.

Read the piece here: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/09/22/merce-cunninghams-posthumous-legacy-plan/

LYNN CRAWFORD’S SHANKUS & KITTO

... / By eugene

i’ve a review up at fanzine of Lynn Crawford’s wonderful new novel: SHANKUS & KITTO. here’s a bit from it:

Lynn Crawford’s new novel is an inside-out family epic where, instead of the usual sweep of generational time, we are given a perspective that allows us to see familial heartbreaks as a telescoping and ever repeating fractal… Crawford is an accurate, sometimes mordant, more often earnest, observer of a new normal… Crawford’s voices capture a particular type of everyday speech. William Carlos Williams, arguing for an American (immigrant) context said that his work derived from “the mouths of Polish mothers.” By writing in a poetry of vernacular, Lynn Crawford has similarly and bravely gone against the grain and in doing so has slyly re-constructed the family epic.

read the rest of the review here: http://thefanzine.com/on-lynn-crawfords-shankus-kitto-a-saga/

but the book here.

Jeremy Hoevenaar’s Insolvency, Insolvency!

... / By eugene

Jeremy Hoevenaar’s Insolvency, Insolvency! is now available for pre-order. Here’s my blurb for it:

Making a precise and brilliant artwork out of the transaction-speak of the internet and the baked-in indeterminacy of theory talk, Hoevenaar’s poems have the circuitry and compressed connection you’ll find once you scalpel out the microchip they’ll soon implant in your skull. These are multisyllabic bars of actuarial nerdrap, featuring an exacting stutter-rhythm, and with a fragment-studded and polished lyric. Want to know what our insolvent and complicit-making world looks like from the inside out? Follow Insolvency, Insolvency!’s links.

more info here: https://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/browse/item/?pubID=593

Month: September 2017