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10 Books to Peel the Scales from Your Eyes

IN THIS MONTH’S SPDCLICKHOLE by Trisha Low

From visionary writers to collaborations that shift our perspective, from work that sheds a light on injustice and dares us to face it, we’re happy to honor this month’s #SPDHANDPICKED theme - VISION - with a list of books that peel the scales from our eyes.

1. Vision of the Children of Evil by Miguel Angel Bustos, trans. Lucina Schell (co-im-press)

"Like the tormented Peruvian César Vallejo or the Spanish madman-savant Leopoldo Panero, Argentina's Miguel Ángel Bustos ransacks the unconscious for its darkest revelations of the inexpressible. Like García Lorca forty years before in Spain, Bustos was murdered for his politics in 1976 by his country's military dictatorship. To render his hallucinated language and his dream-nightmare visions in credible English, Lucina Schell reaches for the edges of expression and introduces us to a strangely gifted, wildly imaginative, prematurely silenced twentieth-century voice."—Stephen Kessler 2. Tela de sevoya / Onioncloth by Myriam Moscona, trans. Antena: Jen Hofer with John Pluecker (Les Figues Press)

The narrator of TELA DE SEVOYA / ONIONCLOTH travels to Bulgaria, searching for traces of her Sephardic heritage. Her journey becomes an autobiographical and imagined exploration of childhood, diaspora, and the possibilities of her family language: Ladino or Judeo-Spanish, the living tongue spoken by descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Memoir, poetry, storytelling, songs, and dreams are interwoven in this visionary text—this tela or cloth that brings the past to life, if only for a moment, and that looks at the present though the lens of history.

3. Television by Claire Millikin (Unicorn Press)

"In this remarkable collection, Claire Millikin has made her own persistent music of a fully felt, fully experienced life in which 'what's broken never heals completely.' Often edging into what seems unspeakable, she finds a language that remains plain, steady, scrupulous, unsentimental and unshowy. Poem after poem registers the poet's 'battle for the moral world'—illuminating not only a single life but its human and environmental surroundings. As a motif draws us to the heart of a piece of music, Millikin's recurrent emblem is the centering fact and force of television: its role—fractured, phantasmagoric and familiar—in home and family, and in the wider world, where it may exercise its 'balm of blue light.'” —Eamon Grennan

4. Actualities by Norma Cole and Marina Adams (Litmus Press)

In this lambent collaboration, visual artist Marina Adams echoes the spareness of Norma Cole's language with delicate lines that contour muscular negative spaces, sometimes stark and densely foreboding, sometimes luxuriant with color. Norma Cole dialogues with Marina Adams with syncopated poems concerned with fragmentation, transformation, love, precarity, and the tenuousness of kinship between places, things, and being. In ACTUALITIES, poet and artist meditate in tandem, moving between anxiety and reconciliation, in a call and response with one another, and with a cosmos that continuously thwarts knowing, refusing to sit still.

5. Tucson Salvage: Tales and Recollections from La Frontera by Brian Jabes Smith (Eyewear Publishing)

This book is a chronicle of the overlooked and unsung, a collection of award-winning essays based on Brian Jabas Smith's popular column, "Tucson Salvage." "A true champion of the dispossessed and forgotten. ... I can't recommend this book highly enough."—Willy Vlautin

6. Bred from the Eyes of a Wolf by Kim Kyung Ju, trans. Jake Levine (Plays Inverse Press)

Equal parts poetry, drama, and sci-fi, award-winning poet Kim Kyung Ju's verse play BRED FROM THE EYES OF A WOLF follows a post-apocalyptic family of wolves (indistinguishable from humans) forced to taxidermy their own cubs in order to survive. An allegory for the degraded social relations of the present, Kim Kyung Ju's all-too-familiar dystopia partitions the male body into monetized parts while the female body is valued only for its reproductive ability. Various mythologies and science fictions layer one over the other—from Oedipus to zombies to a cybernetic police state—in this stunning depiction of family, alienation, and contemporary capitalism, translated from Korean into English for the first time by frequent collaborator Jake Levine.

7. Thirteen Ways of Looking at The Bus by Gizelle Gajelonia (Tinfish Press)

In THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE BUS, Gizelle Gajelonia discovers her muse in Honolulu's TheBus mass transit system. She takes seriously (in this seriously funny chapbook) the notion of routes—routes through Hawai'i's history and geography, routes through American poetry, routes through languages spoken in Hawai'i. Many of the pieces parody canonical poems by T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and Eric Chock. Out of her parodies come marvelous revisions. Among the figures included in Gajelonia's revised canon are Hawai'i's last queen, Lili'uokalani, Filipina nurses, and an honors thesis writer very like the author who dreams of Columbia University.

8. USO: I'll Be Seeing You by Kim Rosenfield (Ugly Duckling Presse)

USO: I'LL BE SEEING YOU is at its core a parable of performance and service. How does one perform/serve issues of identity, race, politics, and the essential vulnerability of what it means to be human? What is language in service of and when does it go too far? What degrades? What supports? What is heroic? What does it mean to put oneself at risk or in harm's way? This book speaks via the poetry of stand-up comedy to the U.S. involvement in the Middle East and the difficulties of naming the unnameable.

9. War and Peace 4: Vision and Text, by Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino, Editors (O Books)

WAR AND PEACE 4: VISION AND TEXT is devoted to collaborations between visual works and poetry, includes collaborative works of Charles Bernstein with Susan Bee, Amy Evans McClure with Michael McClure, Kiki Smith with Leslie Scalapino, Denise Newman with Gigi Janchang, a film on paper by Lyn Hejinian, Alan Halsey's visual texts, Simone Fattal, and Petah Coyne. Judith Goldman interviews Marjorie Welish, Lauren Shufran interviews Jean Boully, Leslie Scalapino interviews Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Also included are E. Tracy Grinnell's homophonic translations of Claude Cahun's "Helene la rebelle" and poems by Fanny Howe, Thom Donovan, and others.

10. How Do I Look? by Sennah Yee (Metatron) Through a series of flash poetry/non-fiction pieces, Sennah Yee's debut full-length book HOW DO I LOOK? paints a colourful portrait of a woman both raised and repelled by the media. With pithy, razor-sharp prose, Sennah dissects and reassembles pop culture through personal anecdotes, crafting a love-hate letter to the media and the microaggressions that have shaped how she sees herself and the world. HOW DO I LOOK? is a raw and vulnerable reflection on identities real and imagined.

All #SPDhandpicked books on VISION are 20% off all month w/ code HANDPICKED

#SPDhandpicked #spdclickhole

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against1a1dark1background · 2 years

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No translation for at least a month. I mean, Hi Google!

Sometimes, I forget I have written something in Indonesian. My first language is English. All of my devices: PC, Surface 8 Pro (waitlisted for nearly 6 weeks) , Surface Book 3, and a kick-arse ASUS gaming laptop all use Bahasa Indonesia as the display language. The only real annoyance is that there's not an Office dictionary for Indonesian, despite it being the 4th most common language in the world. You have to build your own dictionary. I am a photographer this minute, so I need the Super Computer power of JAVION, my PC…take a look (sorry that it's all in Bahasa Indonesia the laptops and my Pixel 6 Pro (waitlisted for over eight weeks) are all set to Indonesian. I need to practice! There are weirdnesses, hark: library in Indonesian is Perpustakaan, but the libraries in File Manager are called Pustaka. Tai kaya gitu dong…

Nama perangkat JAVION

Prosesor AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core Processor 3.40 GHz

RAM terinstal 64.0 GB

ID perangkat

ID Produk

Jenis sistem Sistem operasi 64-bit, prosesor berbasis x64

Pena dan sentuhan Tidak ada input pena atau sentuhan yang tersedia untuk tampilan ini

Edisi Windows 11 Pro

Versi 21H2

Diinstal di ‎20/‎10/‎2021

Build OS 22000.376

Pengalaman Paket Pengalaman Fitur Windows 1000.22000.376.0

The RAM flows in a rainbow, all 64GB of it. Editing multiple images across several Virtual Desktops and I can't even put this PC into third gear!

I live in Brisbane, Australia. It's terrible! I mean 34°C!?

Excuse me, I digest. There's no malice aforethought in one deploying one's second language in which one has become fluent as evidenced by the copypasta above from the "About" section of System. My PC's display language is Indonesian, as is my Pixel 6 Pro, and the Surfaces and Asuses! Android Auto takes commands in English, but gives me directions in Indonesian. It means more concentration from the driver! It's like this: enam ratus meter lajur kiri, belok ke kiri ke Kingston Road menuju Kingston Road tetap tiga kilometer untuk lajur kiri, belok ke kiri ke Clare Street. It comes really fast, so I can have loud music on, but I cannot hold a conversation and listen to Bahasa Indonesia Google maps.

The CIA's list of language learning difficulty or ease puts Mandarin, Arabic, English, and others as requiring twelve hundred (1200) hours of persistent, hard-core study. 30-40 hours a week. Yes, it's a job acquiring another language!

I was surprised to find Indonesian in group 2 - requiring around 900 hours of diligent study. I can, like really offensively swear, speak to anyone on the street in Jakarta. Problem is that I couldn't read an article in formal Indonesian, nor understand the news. This is slowly changing for the better. It's like a fog lifting. It didn't take me long to speak bahasa gaul, which is basically how Australians speak to each other in English. You know, the vernacular. There was a group of young women (goddamn that was when I was 32!) who were all Tionghoa. They forced me to learn street Indonesian which, unless one is meeting the outgoing Indonesian Ambassador to Australia, which one did, then spoke very formal Indonesian to introduce myself and to offer him respect. He said in English "Just call me Kris." Anyway, those gossip loving coffee drinking and wickedly strong cigarettes with cloves in smoking, young professionals got me up to speed in three weeks. I was no longer alone

I was fricken' dropped into it in 2004 coz my anjing mantan pacar decided to work the day I arrived in Jakarta. Lucky I had organised a really cute orang Tionghoa (Chinese-Indonesian - It's really offensive toward orang Tionghoa to call them orang Cina as this term is bonded to a genocide,) internet friend who had kooky teeth like David Bowie's.

The genocide in 1965, or as the novel, and a racist, AWFUL film called The Year of Living Dangerously puts forward is the fact that Suharto, with the army behind him, in a coup d'état and arrested Indonesia's first President, Sukarno. The fact that the USA, UK, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia participated in this genocide which has careful estimates of 750,000 deaths, to the more plausible 2-3 million orang Tionghoa - and suspected communists. By selling a shitload of different types of weapons to the right-wing conservative General Suharto, who would go on to become a tyrant who stole from masyarakatnya the most corrupted assets and cash a world leader has ever amassed. As at the end of the 20th abad, Suharto, along with his goblok son, Tommy, stole around $36 billion USD) .

I rode a motorcycle in Jakarta. I wouldn't ride one in Australia. 1 out of 11 new motorcycle licence holders are killed within the first two years of holding the licence. Doctors and nurses here call motorcyclists organ donors on wheels.

I feel like Tumblr's own FDR, speaking to you over the wireless, rambling about all sorts of shit!

Isn't it funny that when General Douglas Macarthur put forward during the Korean War, the idea that because Chinese troops were pouring over the border

— well Macarthur's last suggestion to President Truman was that they nuke the border. The man who had signed the Japanese surrender documents on the USS Missouri wanted to nuke China.

Thing is, as awful those weapons are, if Doug had had his wish, the world would be unrecognisably different. The USSR were belabouring under the so-called Missile Gap, in which the USA had more ICBMs with MIRVs , China had only just tested their own bomb, the last above-ground nuclear weapon test by the USSR would be the Tsar Bomba. The MOST powerful deliberate explosion ever. Sixty-three million tonnes of TNT! It was their answer to the US testing of thermonuclear weapons in the Pacific.

The British asked if they might have a little jape out in the desert at a place called Maralinga. The UK tested their nuclear weapons here in Australia. The so-called empty land had a population of Indigenous Australians - First Nations people. Their sovereignty was never CEDED!

Anyway, our Prime Minister at the time, and arselicker of the UK, asked nicely if we could have some of those lovely nuclear weapons. Our true rulers at the time said that we didn't need any because it would "create an undesirable regional arms race." Not very convincing…Now, not just the UK, but the USA are giving the Royal Australian Navy five nuclear-powered submarines. There's even a new Security Bloc: AUKUS. Australia, the UK, and the USA have a new defence treaty. Additionally, we have what began as informal trade talks; now the USA, Japan, Australia, and India are in a Defence Bloc called The Quadrilateral Security Dialog. Can anyone guess why?

This piece of rambling incoherence brought to you by the fact that it's --- OMG!

We had an occasion to have the police in our house. They're all wearing bodycams.

First, this neo-nazi junior cuntstable asked me what had happened. Now, memory recall is never linear. I began to explain several times the reason for the Polizei's attendance and this illiterate (I mean the document he submitted to the court read as if were written by a nine-year-old child.) As each time he asked me begin the events as I witnessed them because his short-term memory was so appalling, he kept calling what had happened THE SITUATION. I kept moving backwards so his body cam could catch everything, but he wanted to know about The Situation! I was fed up with this ex-army cuntstable, I almost asked him if he had killed anyone in Afghanistan. I did however, turn to ACADEMIC ENGLISH! I went for it.

Little boy with gun (cop): I'm not getting a consistent story from ya mate.

Charles: I see you are a fan of the traditional, three-act method of stories, yes? Myself, I often prefer to begin in media res somewhere, or have the whole film be as an examination derived from the context, mise-en-scene, cinematography and by the film's end.

Cop: I’d prefer it the…the first one you said.

He was looking bully and confused.

We spoke more, and the fuckwittiest thing that happened in the whole ordeal was me explaining my actions were naught but a piece of theatre and that it had been "A TEST DESIGNED TO PROVOKE AN EMOTIONAL RESPONSE" This sentence made its way into court via cuntstable fuckwit's report. Not a single one of the people at the court, nor the police, noted one of the most iconic lines in one of the most iconic two films that are the Bladerunner cycle, about which I have completed much study, both the 2007 cut of Bladerunner and Villeneuve's crackin' 2049. I saw a YT "review" by some schmuck who complained that it took too long for the characters to answer each other. Goddamn it! Denis had to cut the film down to just under three hours. You folks who rely on dialogue to follow the whole story are really letting yourselves down. The cinema is a visual medium with a filmic language of its own - and once you begin to read these visual cues and especially what's called mise-en-scene. Go look it up. For your own edification. And to ram the point home watch these two Australian films made by well-known Indigenous Australians. Have a look at Warwick Thornton’s work Samson & Delilah. Hardly a line of dialogue spoken. Also Ivan Sen’s Mystery Road uses the mise-en-scene, camera angles and tightly focused sections of dialogue to tell a complex, but visually full of information;

Hampton Fancher wrote a magnificent story and screenplay, along with others. Fancher is the unsung hero of these two films — weaving the two stories together seamlessly.

"Dying for the right cause is the most human thing we can do."

"Somebody lived this, yes." Why is the happy Dr Stelline moved to tears immediately on extracting the memory from Agent K? It's not K at the furnace with the wooden horse, it's Ana Stelline.

Okay, that's enough. I'm done, I'm done…I’m done!

#random #gossip #not important #Charles' Fictional Memoirs & Sci-Fi & Pop Culture

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