Archival 5¢ense Flashes 2006

(ephemeral outbursts too brief and transitory for the full-fledged 5¢ense):

 

 

December 2006

¢ I'll be climbing after goats, riding camels and looking for barbary apes for the next few weeks. I'll give a full report in January. 

¢ All I took away from suicide turn was the clear-cut swath in the forested mountain in the shape of the US. 

Read and recommended:  Disciplines by Diana George, finely produced by Noemi Press.

¢ Brian Evenson was KGB on 12/20. 

¢ Canvas goes to Condo... yet another sign to leave Manhattan rather than buy into it.

¢ The new Tarpaulin Sky, guest edited by Selah Saterstrom, is really something. I'm sure I'll be coming back to it.

¢ Blake Butler reviews Poste Restante again, this time for Bookslut (a sort of redemption, though I've never dreamt or written about Jesus Christ, for Christ's sake, it's this Jesus, my old friend and colleague. Also in this issue of Bookslut is a revealing interview Angela Stubbs did with Brian Evenson.

¢ November saw 12528 unique visitors to sleepingfish.net. Some things people were looking for:
"turkey dance" (140), " pumpkin smashing" (21), " snow men" (9), " gray sky" (4), " baptismal font" (2), " pictures of people shitting" (2), " animals on noah's ark" (1), " beach combing queen conch" (1), " bullfight ninja cola" (1), " cougar phylogeny" (1), " curious ostrich" (1), " dada fish" (1), " pantyhose cocoon" (1), " stories by dysfunctional kids" (1), and " why do mexicans eat crickets on the day of the dead" (1).

 

November 2006

¢ Pictures from our trip to Seville and Granada.  

¢ How about giving thanks by NOT eating turkey? Or for that matter not eating anything for a day?

Read and recommended:  Tony Takitani by Haruki Murakami, albeit not cheap for it's size, though its slick design makes it worth it, if you didn't already it read it in The New Yorker.

Read and recommended:  The Attention Lesson by P.F. Potvin (which includes some pieces that were in the most recent Sleepingfish

¢ A rather interesting review of Poste Restante in elimae

Read and recommended: Oberiu: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism

¢ Poetry is a waste of paper. True conservationists write tight prose. 

¢ Brian Evenson, Meredith Brosnan, John Yau, Christine Schutt, and Diane Williams all read at FusionArts Museum (57 Stanton Street) in NYC on Sunday, Nov 19.  

¢ A cosmic alignment of bands tomorrow night at Irving Plaza: Blood Brothers and And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead.  

Digging this chap of surreal flash fictions, I'm really Scared When I Kill in My Dreams by Brandon Freels

¢ Christian Peet will be reading at the Poetry Project on November 13 with Dana Teen Lomax, Jane Sprague, Matvei Yankelevich and Wendy Walters.

¢ Eduardo Recife launched a new commercial website showcasing some of his mind-blowing work.

¢ Kevin Sampsell interviewed me for the Powell's Blog

¢ New piece of mine in Hobart. This also appears in Poste Restante.  

 

October 2006

¢ Video clip of The Rapture doing House of Jealous Lovers last night at Irving Plaza. Third time we've seen them and they only get better.

¢ Dogs in drag. It doesn't get much better than this. 

¢ Sometimes I get submissions for Sleepingfish that are interesting, but I just don't know what to do with, maybe because the context is not right or they are color photographs, like some of these shots by Timothy Johnston.

Read and recommended: Hangings by Nina Shope.

¢ Chad Sweeney's A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer is available from Tarpaulin Sky. I got myself a copy and it's quite a beautiful production. 

bridging the spiegeltent circuit.

¢ Started my new job today. Here's some of the sites I'll be working on.

¢ Girls Who Pee Spoons! Does a rise in crime, corruption, etc. cause a rise in the absurdity of news headlines? Some sort of warped denial, a yearning for an altered reality? Would The Daily Show be funny if everything was hunky dory?

¢ Some interesting sentences from Sentence 4: "It's useless to try to catch the crumbs of the crumbling universe" (Christine Boyka Kluge) and "You've been trying to do 69 with infinity but infinity is already doing a number on itself, the sideways lazy eight" (Robert Lunday). Also an inordinate amount of slag and quadratic equations and two fine pieces by James Tate.

¢ My own Poste Restante is now available from Calamari Press.  

¢ P.F. Potvin's new book out, The Attention Lesson

¢ I posted some images that I've been working on for Miranda Mellis' The Revisionist

¢ "Did you see those stylish kids in the riot?" Pete Doherty shambles on about his poetic influences. 

¢ Pictorial travelogue from Paris

¢ Sand Camels by by George Steinmetz. 

¢ Colloidal Brother of Brothers up on Lamination Colony.  

 

September 2006

¢ September 2006 saw over 10,000 unique visitors to Sleepingfish/5¢ense from 87 different countries, including 12 visitors from Tuvalu, the second least populous country in the world. What people were searching for... "wardrobe malfunction" (32), "found note" (10), "aztec fish" (8), "gato" (7), "textual art" (5), "native american graffiti" (4), "upside down question marks" (4), "what is the sound of one hand clapping" (2), "why do dogs eat mud" (2), "achey butt hole" (1), "can i buy capuchin monkey white face" (1), and "char" (1). I can only hope people found what they were looking for.

¢ One of my favorite albums of all time, inspired and named after one of my favorite books of all time, has been remixed and remastered for its 25th birthday, with some additional material. You can check it out online here: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Byrne/Eno even encourage you to remix your own versions or create your own inspired videos. 

¢ My last day working for Comedy Central is today. I'll miss working around such good content as The Daily Show and Colbert Report. Not that it still won't remain my most reliable news source. Looking forward to Freak Show.

Red Hook : Wharfhoused Trolley Expansion Lines.

¢ For those wondering what the first edition (1977) of battlefield where the moon says I love you looks like. 

¢ Aligned in the Ranks of Amoebic Ancestry.

¢ "This leaves the translating poet with two options: one, create the best poem possible using the same ‘information’ as the original author; or two, forget the information and try to capture the essential. Most poetry translations fall into the first category, James Wagner’s Trilce falls into the second." --Nick Bredie, review in Tarpaulin Sky

¢ The new elimae has a text/image piece of mine, as well as some other goodies including one by Ali Aktan Askin.

¢ Where is this country headed? I heard that annoying Panic at the Disco song on the radio the other day and they censored the word god, when he says, "Haven’t you people ever heard of closing a god damn door?!" If that's the case, why don't they write, "In [Bleep] We Trust" on our money, because the usage of god in that case is far more objectionable. Jesus fucking Christ scary.

Read and recommended: What begins with bird by Noy Holland. 

¢ Peter Markus' Good, Brother is now available from Calamari Press

¢ Some good stuff in the new Alice Blue #4, including work by Sara Levine, Kristen Iskandrian and  Benjamin Buchholz.

¢ Christian Peet's The Nines is now available from Palm Press. Here's the evolution of the cover art.

¢ First, Grisha Perelman solves the elusive Poincaré conjecture, then rewards himself by turning down the Fields Metal.

¢ Chris Fritton's The String Manual in the latest Diagram "contains found fragments of a State issued publication, a handbook for social and physical interaction in a world where fluid has been supplanted by string."

¢ Dead/Asleep Project: Jackie Milad's investigation into the practice of fake dying and sleeping in public spaces. 

¢  The new Word For/Word #10 not only has some images from my forthcoming Poste Restante, but also some images and text from Michael Peters Vaast B1n: n Ephemerisi, also forthcoming from Calamari Press.

¢ The Post-Hole project keeps growing on Sidebrow, with a new one by Bill Marsh

 

August 2006

¢ Some things people were looking for in August when they instead found Sleepingfish.net: "tree roots" (28), "airplane graveyard" (15), "belly punching" (9), "noahs ark animals" (2), "brothers jerking off each other", "effects on eye while reading and sleeping", "either of the lobes of a whale's tail", "gathering of snakes", "guinea pig fortune telling", "pots of gold", "subduing geese" and "turkey baptismal font".

¢ Splashscreens of infinite: Rodeo 27.

Potassium Cloudburst 

¢ "... culture has departed from the genes and become something unto itself ... it has acquired emergent properties no longer connected to the genetic and psychological processes that initiated it. Hence, omnis cultura ex cultura. All culture comes from culture." -- from Consilience, by Edward O. Wilson.

¢ Even if you don't have the guts to throw down on a canvas, now you too can be Jackson Pollock.

¢ Among the sentences that can grant you U.S. citizenship: "I am too busy to talk today."

¢ Regardless of what we call it, Pluto is Pluto. Does it care?

¢ Images of Yucatán posted.

¢ Learn only to trust direction observation.

¢ How to cope with a hot day in NYC.

¢ The World's Fair : a new blog by David Ng (of Science Creative Quarterly fame) and Benjamin Cohen (of McSweeney's Annals of Science fame). 

¢ This is where I will be this week

 

July 2006

Read and Recommended : 3rd Bed #11, especially the piece by Nina Shope.

¢ A preview of what to expect from Peter Markus' Good, Brother (forthcoming from Calamari Press) posted on Big Window.

Denature Cycle (left out to dry). 

¢ "But it's actually George Belden who is the pure fancy of author Norman Lock, whose work in general reflects a Borgesian/Pessoan proclivity for false-bottom topographies." --from review of Land of the Snow Men in American Book Review.

¢ In protest of global warming, I took down my links.

¢ The importance of not only information, but how it is presented: Hans Rosling on global health.

¢ Looks like 3rd Bed #11, the final one, is officially available. Though you may have problems finding it in bookstores. It's always a better idea anyway to just get it straight from the source.  

¢ Thom Yorke just did some live Eraser numbers on the Henry Rollins Show, here's The Clock.

¢ Gary Lutz on his avoidance of brandnames and other cultural markings (amongst other things): "My characters seem bent on piecing themselves out of any big picture, and I have to honor their wish." 

¢ Thom Yorke as The Eraser interview up on youtube.

Holey Wood & Vine O-Rama.

¢ Sleepingfish 0.875 is back from the printers and available for public consumption.  

¢ Hello Kitty : ever wonder how much sleepingfish a cat can lift (in Japanese)? 

¢ Saw the Dada exhibit at the MOMA yesterday. If you can stand the crowds, I'd highly recommend it. If you don't live in nyc, then there's this online feature.

¢ We saw Baaba Maal last night and Jess took these photos. His vocal delivery was electrifying. Inspired and well-dressed people would climb on stage and fling money at the performers, twist the dreads on the tops of their heads, join in the dance, or in one case a member of the audience took over on drums for two entire songs. 

Read and Recommended : The Long Rowing Unto Morning by Norman Lock.

¢ third online installment of Lance Olsen's Anxious Pleasures posted.

 

June 2006

¢ Today, in a meeting discussing the usability and design of a website, I learned that the English language is 75% redundant, as are most languages. Googling around, I also learned that redundancy is desirable to raise the chances of receiving a good message when the medium is noisy.

¢ Post-hole: A departure point for collaborative fiction.

¢ mIEKAL aND reveals concrete poetry in the under water caves and rock formations of Cave Point, WI. 

¢ When it rain it pours : A Q&A with Tristan Davies on the evolution of the Morton's Girl.

¢ An appreciation of Jenny Boully's [one love affair]* is dependent on how ripe you like your fruit.

Discrete Downward Spiral to Discretion.

¢ mutti, the second online installment of Lance Olsen's Anxious Pleasures, is now alive.

¢ Crag Hill scanned in the images from the first 5 issues of Score for those who missed out. Here's one by Marily Rosenberg that I found particularly interesting. 

¢ Clips (WMVs) from last nights Be Your Own Pet show at the Knitting Factory:

    

¢ The Field-Tested Books project's version of the Heisenberg principle: reading a certain book in a certain place uniquely affects a person's experience with both.

¢ Why wait for a miracle when you yourself can put the image of Jesus right on your food?

¢ Streets are saying things : Putting the concrete back in Concrete Poetry...

¢ grete : the first excerpt of five from Lance Olsen's Anxious Pleasures to be published online in SleepingFish.net.

¢ in his recent review, G.S. Evans speculates that future scholarship will likely prove Norman Lock's assertion regarding George Belden’s absence from Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated expedition as false. 

¢ Kick off the summer season of free concerts in nyc with Dead Meadow at South Street Seaport on June 2 at 7 PM. Also free and downtown, on Sunday June 4 is the Bang on a Can Marathon

 

May 2006

¢ Meerkat Manor!  Now this is some serious drama I can get into. It premieres June 9th on Animal Planet.

¢ A white blind crustacean, discovered by scientists in a cave in Israel (thanks Deron at Clusterflock). The accompanying article kind of reminded (in a sickening way) of how the suburban sprawl of my old pueblo is encroaching, ironically, on Biosphere 2. It makes me glad that I now live in a city with boundaries, whose previous ecology is already dead. 

¢ Abandoned Museums : comprehensive review of Sleepingfish and Calamari Press in Tarpaulin Sky.

¢ Pieces from O, Vozque Pulp in new Alice Blue.

¢ London Views : images from Stanley Donwood's exhibit online for those who can't make it to London.

¢ The Butcher and the Snakes: That's what's called a gusher, his friends at the bar explained.

Flasher Crossing Delancey: moving again, from LES south of Delancey north to ABC.

¢ Dragging a Cat Downhill: A Lesson in “Action at a Distance” published online in Pindeldyboz

¢ The odds on Brother Derek are 5/2.

¢ "Historically, they were found, frozen, in their sleeping bags; Belden gives his personal version of Scott's funeral in the trolley-car hearse with the bell tolling for the last Snow Man." --from a review by Paula Grenside in Avatar Review.

 

April 2006

¢ According to the drunk Irish guy at the Four-Faced Liar, James Wagner's reading was heavy. James said it wasn't his fault. After the reading, we ate at Haveli and found a cockroach in our Baingan Bhurta. It almost blended in with the mashed eggplant seeds and skin, but the legs, head and tentacles sticking out were a dead give-away. 

¢ James Wagner will be reading with Elena Rivera, Selah Saterstrom, Jonathon Skinner & Jane Sprague this Saturday, April 29 at the Four-Faced Liar.

¢ [one love affair]* by Jenny Boully is now available from Tarpaulin Sky Press. 

¢ I saw Gary Lutz read tonight at the Mercantile Library with Christine Schutt. He read People Shouldn't Have To Be The Ones To Tell You. What struck me most was how much people were laughing at sentences that otherwise made perfect sense. Funny or not, other people shouldn't have to be the ones to tell you.

¢ Wolf Dust : a fine poem by Joshua Marie Wilkinson in the new elimae.

¢ Brother Derek: #1 contender for the derby! 

¢ So you think you're funny? Now's your chance to prove it.

I went to Chicago and all I took was this picture.

¢ Shakespeare meets The Selfish Gene.

¢ Why go to all this trouble to paint an animal on your wall? Richard Siken weighs in.

¢ Will overfishing in shallow waters cause deep fish like Abyssal grenadiers to inherit the earth?

¢ I know what you are supposed to bring home from Matthew Barney and Björk's self-indulgent Drawing Restraint 9 is that at the moment of commitment (and devotion to ritual), nature conspires to help you, but all I kept thinking was that I was dying to see the blooper reel. 

 

March 2006

¢ A cephalopodic cousin to Calamari Press, the new Octopus Books is launching with a chapbook contest, although I am reluctant to recommend anything with a reading fee, even if it has 8 legs and squirts ink. Let's hope we don't see them on Foetry.com. 

Xantham b-D-mannopyranose Guar in Colloidal Supension.

¢ Cover concept for John Olson's The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat.

¢ Speaking of meerkats, here's what happens when they hear a recording of themselves.

¢ Yesterday we went to the Museum of Natural History to see the Darwin exhibit and we saw Alice Cooper.

¢ The Found Footage Festival, a showcase of odd and hilarious found video clips recovered from dumpsters, garage sales, flea markets, etc., at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn this Friday and Saturday night.

¢ If you X-Ray a lemur, you get meerkats: a primordial translated text/photo collage from the newly launched Action Yes online quarterly

¢ Thanks to Daniel Borzutzky, we have this fine translation of a story by the Chilean Juan Emar that otherwise might have been lost to time: The Green Bird

Buoyed by transgenic char.

¢ Meet Kiwi Hirsuta, a new species of eyeless shellfish discovered in some hydrothermal vents near Easter Island. 

¢ Quicksand.

¢ Sleepingfish 0.75 breaks into Powell's Small Press Top 10.

Frosty flash of the day. 

¢ Pure Bliss: This is what our bodies were put on this planet to do (thanks, Max, for enlightening). 

¢ Native American Street Food on the Bowery: Azeez, who used to clean the windows of high-rise buildings, has not actually had a lifelong dream of cooking professionally. "It's more based on art than anything else," he says. "And the theory of seeing and wanting. I just decided to take my art to the streets." 

 

February 2006

¢ Autistic basketball player catches fire and shoots the lights out. Get psyched for March Madness! 

¢ Susan Happersett painstakingly turns Fibonacci sequences into art: images from her unpublished book in Seed Magazine.

¢ Mario Milosevic posts 100 fine words a day in his Conditional Reality. My favorite, Sailors Have Long Believed that Magical Things Happen When Ships Cross the Equator

¢ Mike Topp has answers to the questions that matter on his Red Boldface blog: Why do Flamingos stand on one leg? How long can kittens stay underwater? Why do the swallows return to the mission on a given day?

Flash photo memento: Pin(e-Zinc Coif) Drop 

¢ Web page of the day: Elk Mouth Taxidermy Mounting Procedures

¢ Elimae celebrates its 10th anniversary in style, with new work online by Daryl Scroggins, Kathryn Rantala, Liesl Jobson, Norman Lock, Peter Conners, Kevin Sampsell and more...

¢ “It’s not about moral failings or any sort of psychological thing. People aren’t lazy—they just base their decisions on what other people are doing.” 

¢ Who would've guessed that the man behind the Colbert Report was in a band back in the 80s? This heartfelt power ballad by Stephen and the Colberts goes out to a special lady on Valentine's day. 

¢ The mildest January in the books is punctuated by a single-day record snowfall

¢ New species of birds and frogs discovered in Papua New Guinea. 

¢ The history, development and evolution of the world's writing systems. Can you guess what the most spoken languages of the world are? 

Stealing a page from Jess, I am going to post a flash photo of the moment every other Wednesday (or so).

 

January 2006

¢ New issue of 5_Trope is up.

¢ "While the fiction marketplace (like the major label recording industry) is glutted with over-hyped and underwhelming product, it is dedicated practitioners like Markus who toil under the mainstream radar in the name of their respective art." -- review of The Singing Fish in PopMatters.

¢ Lots of exciting stuff going on in recent new issues of DIAGRAMLocus Novus, Failbetter, Octopus, elimae, and XCP: Streetnotes.

¢ Jeff Hurlow, a fine and twisted artist that I used to work with at Napster, is looking for subjects from the greater Chicago area for his MySpace Portrait Project

¢ The literally literary education I'm getting working at Comedy Central: The American Dialect Society voted truthiness as the word of the year. First heard on the Colbert Report, truthiness refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. 

¢ The farces of JT Leroy and James Frey both exposed for what they are worth. At least the canard of George Belden is at no one's expense. 

¢ Sleepingfish editor Robert Lopez will be reading at the KGB Bar on Sunday January 15 at 7 p.m. along with Nelly Reifler, Gina Zucker and Jonathan Dixon. I'm bummed I'll be out of town. 

¢ My other half, Jessica Fanzo, redesigned her site and put up some new photos.

¢ The new Tarpaulin Sky is up, take shelter. The new Double Room is also up, featuring some of my work.

¢ For those with a morbid fascination with celebrity death pools and betting on who will die in 2006, it's time to keep your death watch

 

2006 daily ARkive[r]

2005 daily ARkive[r]

 

cuRRent & ARkiveD 5¢ense bLOGjects

 

 

(c) 2003-2006 Derek White / Sleepingfish / Calamari Press