2012 DISINHIBITIONS: THOM DONOVAN

“Stage Presence: Theatricality in Art and Media” (exhibit at SFMOMA)

“Ben Kinmont: Prospectus” (exhibit at SFMOMA)

“Bernadette Corporation: 2000 wasted years” retrospective at Artists Space

Hito Steyerl’s The Wretched of the Screen (e-flux journal and Sternberg Press) and Adorno’s Grey video installation at e-flux

Stacy Doris’ Fledge: a Phenomenology of Spirit (Nightboat Books)

Eleni Stecopoulos’ Daphnephoria (Compline)

Suzanne Stein’s Tout Va Bien (Displaced Press)

Andrew Levy’s Don’t Forget to Breathe (Chax Press)

Brandon Brown’s Flowering Mall (Roof Books) and from Everything That’s On My Walls (self-published for “5Corners” exhibition at [2nd Floor Projects], SF)

Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells (Verso)

Laura Elrick’s Propagation (Kenning Editions)

Dorothea Lasky’s Thunderbird (Wave Books)

CA Conrad’s A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics (Wave Books)

Rob Halpern’s Music for Porn (Nightboat Books)

The Volta

Rodrigo Toscano’s Deck of Deeds (Counterpath Press)

Jon Leon’s The Malady of the Century (Futurepoem Books)

Diana Hamilton’s OKAY, OKAY (Truck Books)

Josef Kaplan’s Democracy Is Not For the People (Truck Books)

Tyrone Williams’ Howell (Atelos)

Matvei Yankelevich’s Alpha Donuts (United Artists)

Evelyn Reilly’s Apocalypso (Roof Books)

Ariel Goldberg’s The Estrangement Principle (self-published)

Eileen Myles’ Snowflake / different streets (Wave Books)

Dana Ward’s The Crisis of Infinite Worlds (Futurepoem Books, in manuscript)

I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press; ed. Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Brown, Teresa Carmody, and Vanessa Place)

Julian Talamantez Brolaski’s Advice for Lovers (City Lights)

Joseph Bradshaw’s “George Oppen’s ‘Of Being Numerous’” (performed for The Multifarious Array series and at 443 PAS Gallery)

Homage to Etel Adnan (Post-Apollo Press; ed. Lindsey Boldt, Steve Dickison, and Samantha Giles)

Catherine Wagner’s Nervous Device (City Lights)

“It’s the Political Economy, Stupid” (exhibition at Austrian Cultural Forum, NYC; curated by Gregory Sholette and Oliver Ressler)

Brandon Shimoda’s O Bon (Litmus Press)

Kevin Killian’s and Ugo Rondinone’s Nude (Gladstone Gallery, NYC)

“Poetry During OWS” (featured in Rethinking Marxism, vol. 25)

“Our Occupations After the Occupations” at Harriet (Poetry Foundation)

“The Hole, A Gathering” (at St. Mark’s Poetry Project; organized by Brett Price)

Occupy Sandy Relief

Steve Collis’ Dispatches From the Occupation (Talon Books)

Peter Linebaugh’s Ypsilanti Vampire Mayday (Occupy Ypsilanti)

Lawrence Giffin’s and Lauren Spohrer’s Just Kids (Agnes Fox)

OMG! vol. 1 (featuring Elaine Kahn, Lauren Levin, and Wendy Trevino; ed. Brandon Brown)

Damn the Caesars: Crisis Inquiry (ed. Richard Owens)

The Sonnets (Nightboat Books and Telephone magazine; ed. Paul Legault and Sharmila Cohen)

Fred Moten with Ultra-red (2012 Whitney Biennial, “What is the Sound of Freedom?” symposium)

Andrea Fraser’s “There’s no place like home” (essay for the 2012 Whitney Biennial catalogue)

Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011 (Creative Time and MIT Press; ed. Nato Thompson)

David Buuck performances at Segue Series and Small Press Traffic

Monica Peck’s The Pyrrhaiad (Trafficker Press; ed. Erin Morrill and Andrew Kenower)

Ragtag Four (featuring Evan Kennedy, Erin Morrill, and Ted Rees)

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (ed. Judah Rubin)

Sara Larsen’s Merry Hell (Compline)

Douglas Crimp’s “Our Kind of Movie” (MIT Press)

John Kelsey’s Rich Texts (Sternberg Press)

The Feeling Is Mutual (ed. Sara Wintz; designed by Michael Cross and Stephen Novotny)

WE INTERRUPT OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING...

to bring you this pic of ETC. That is all.

2012 DISINHIBITIONS: NORMA COLE

2 favorite things from 2012

Roberto Calasso, La Folie Baudelaire

Franz Koglmann, L’Heure bleue

2012 DISINHIBITIONS: BRANDON BROWN

Omigod, I saw and read and heard so much amazing art in 2012. I saw Eileen Myles give an encore reading in a freaking Laundromat. I heard Anne Boyer read not once but twice. I heard Francesca Lisette read one of my favorite poems ever at Woolsey Heights, one of my favorite reading series ever. Alli Warren wrote a book. You know? But lest this opening disclaimer turn into a best-of-the-year list despite my dystentions, I have to tell you that I’m lacking the energy, wit, and critical acumen to do justice to any of these things—and I have to satisfy myself with a couple of brief remarks about that new Ke$ha record.

Not that I’m doing anything resembling justice to Warrior, which is so new as to be almost unknowable. I mean new in the sense that it came out in early December, but also “new” in the sense that Ke$ha and her team of writers and producers address themselves directly to the contemporary, which, as Agamben reminds us, is a dark place. Difficult to see. The only thing I mean to insinuate here is that, for me, Ke$ha’s work is supremely about happiness. Which is to say, it is profoundly concerned with ethics.

I think we’ve been so oversaturated by the semiotics of the modern workplace and its preventive lexicon against malpractice that we’ve forgotten that “ethics” in this history of philosophy basically refers to an inquiry into what makes life good. The Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle amount to a series of notes about eudaimonia, literally perhaps “being in good spirits.” And this is the mode Ke$ha partakes in, reiterating two of the greatest phrases in English “Come on” and “Let’s Go” as hortatory subjunctives to join her in radiant happiness. Radiant, happy, and in a gold Trans Am.

Now I know many of Disinhibitor’s readers are going to be dissuaded by what Ke$ha’s music sounds like. But if aurally her work hearkens to Katy Perry, the island of Mykonos, and Kid Rock or Iggy Pop (depending on how generous one wants to be), politically she falls in between LaFargue and Blanqui. Seriously! One of the absolutely distinguishing features of Ke$ha’s work is its alignment against the money form and spectacular displays of wealth. Nor does she, in her work at least, herald the work ethic. So in “All That Matters (The Beautiful Life)” (a most Aristotelian of titles) she sings, “Been spending too much energy / on stupid shit when honestly / I wanna get high / just wanna get high / with everyone else here.”

But while much of Warrior’s philosophy concerns a reverent devotion to pleasure and solidarity with those "(political) animals" who share her ethic, it doesn’t rule out turning the power of the group towards social transformation. As she sings on the title track “Warrior,” in harmony with increasing numbers in a world scorched by austerity and rampant accumulation, “I think it’s time for a revolution.”


        

2012 DISINHIBITIONS: ZOE TUCK

My contribution begins with pointing (just a little) at the achievements of my partner in love and poetry, Brittany Billmeyer-Finn. Consider yourself advised to seek out the meshes, Brittany Billmeyer-Finn's manuscript as it becomes available. She finds new ways to take on identity, voyeurism, reading, film, experimentalism, Haiti... I've been fortunate enough to watch this book grow and participate in a polyvocal performance of part of it with Jose Vadi, Jess Heaney, and Cheena Marie Lo. An artist's book edition is forthcoming from Manifest Press. I'm excited for the artist's book and downright impatient for the paperback edition which I can carry around in my bag.

For a little over half the year, I've had the pleasure to live at an apartment called The Tender Oracle, home to Manifest Reading Series, in which I've taken a supporting role, the better to enjoy the curatorial successes of Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Cheena Marie Lo, and Kate Robinson. This year has seen readings and performances by: Madison Davis, Alana Siegel, Erika Staiti, Sara Wintz, Steve Orth, Marcus Lund, Lauren Levin, Elaine Kahn, Erin Morrill, Ted Rees, Lauren Ireland, Stella Peach, Francesca Lisette, Lara Durback, Claudia Castro-Luna, Erin Heath, Laura Woltag, Ryan Funk, and Annah Anti-Palindrome. Alongside these great performers, one of Manifest's successes is affectual, rather than literary. Tenderness versus cliquishness! No year-long waiting period for admission into the sanctum sanctorum! I don't want to give Manifest all the love, because SPT's focus on genders/bodies/hybrids has been exceptional, Re@ds, The Long Haul, Woolsey, Featherboard, and Live at 851 (to name a few) are rocking it.

I'll try to list a few favorite readings in reverse chronological order:

• iduna: an opera in one act. Have we talked yet about what it meant to come together like this?

• Weeks/Billmeyer-Finn/Young reading mentioned above

• Craig Dworkin and Myung Mi Kim

• David Brazil's brazen sermon at The Long Haul

• Samantha Giles' post-darwinian poems at Featherboard

• Alice Notley at the Unitarian Church

• Nico Peck & Trace Peterson at ATA

• Live at 851: Michelle Tea, Jarett Kobek, Nate Waggoner, Emji Spero

• Hoa Nguyen and Murat Nemet-Nejat at the Green Arcade

• Cheena Marie Lo, Paolo Javier, and Cathy Park Hong at ATA

• Jane Gregory, Brandon Brown, and Lauren Levin at Featherboard

• Steve Orth, Tom Comitta, Amy Berkowitz, and others at Live at 851

• Margaret Christakos & Joey Casio at the Speakeasy

• CAConrad and Eileen Myles at the laundromat + the “Capacity Salon”

• Radar Book Club with Justin Vivian Bond & Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

• Re@ds with Jackqueline Frost and special guest Pine.

This has also been an amazing year for the Public School. Ever since I dropped out of high school, I've dreamed of a free school which recognizes intellectual/literary/aesthetic concerns as inextricable from the sort of political ideals which motivate the creation of free schools to begin with. I was fortunate enough to participate in the kick off week. Each night was organized around a theme. Do yourself a favor and look it up. Do us all a favor and teach a class/attend one/host.

Other things I loved:

• starting to use a new name

• Girl Talk: a trans & cis woman dialogue

• Invisible Dance Show at Lake Merritt

• Sarah Jessee's curated radio listening party

• Jenn Hoff's Spatial Awareness: Dance & Movement Class which I made it to about one of but will nonetheless vouch for.

• I defy anyone to deny that Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe (and its many covers) was the jam of the year.

• The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry; a pre-9/11 investigation into embodiment and the phenomenology of pain, specifically as a result of war and torture, its effect on language and expression.

• It was the 10th anniversary of the prison at Guantanamo

• East Bay Public Crying Coalition, Lukascza Branfman-Verissimo, Zoe Ozma. Have you ever cried in public? Local artists Branfman-Verissimo and Ozma stand in solidarity.

• The incipient field of Quarry Studies, which mostly consists of Zoe Ozma and I looking at Oakland's Bilger Quarry through the lenses of psychogeography, situationism, trans*ing, temporary autonomous zones, etc.

• Ariel Goldberg's The Estrangement Principle

• Aufgabe Issue #11

• prettyqueer.com

• Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by Jose Esteban Munoz which led to

• Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope

• being obsessed with René Descartes

• The Body Ghost by Joseph Lease

• Rebekah Edward's Trans Poetics class

• the concepts YOLO (you only live once) and FOMO (fear of missing out)

• As Long As Trees Last, Hoa Nguyen

• I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women, edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody, and Vanessa Place

• Where Eagles Dare, the new lo fi journal with hi fi sound, edited by Steve Orth

• The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, the documentary from Adopt Films, Marie Losier, director

• Beasts of the Southern Wild, I cried hard at this post-Katrina magical realism

• Witch Father, unknown artist, graffito on 22nd Street between Telegraph and MLK, an example of the crystal butch gender

• WHITE RAINBOW, aka Adam Forkner. They were playing this in a coffee shop in Austin which I've confirmed no longer exists. This is often what I write to.

• Upside Drown. They're magical. Miss the free shows at the Speakeasy.

• Jai Arun Ravine's reviews. You hopefully know ze's แล้ว and then entwine is good, but did you know about hir book reviews?

• 2012's Mondo Bummer line up, which brings me to

• Amy Berkowitz's Listen to Her Heart

• The Dream of Doctor Bantam, Jeanne Thornton. I see a little Michelle Tea in this, and a little Eileen Myles, and a lot of Thornton. Yes.

• This Can't Be Life, Dana Ward, every bit as good as everyone said it was.

• the masks and other art of Emily Goldface

• Justin Carder's show at Zach Houston's gallery

• visiting NY and Philadelphia

• Decreation, Anne Carson. Maybe I skimmed this in 2006, but this year I read it. Beautiful and useful for writing about

• Samuel Beckett's oeuvre. Took a class on it and hope to share any knowledge gained at the Public School in 2013

Most of all the poetry/activist/queer/magic/scholarly communities of the Bay Area are so great, I STOPPED LIKING MONEY. It “can't buy me love,” which I've had in such abundance.

2012 DISINHIBITIONS: JAMIE TOWNSEND

2012 was way better than 2011; here's why:

E. Tracy Grinnell & Aufgabe (best boss & job i've ever had)

Dusan Makavejev's "Sweet Movie"

Brandon Brown's "Flowering Mall"

"Armor On", "Whiteout", and everything else Dawn Richard related

Seeing "Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky" in the theater for my birthday

Marissa Perel's "Yentl Redux"

Laura Jaramillo's "Material Girl"

finally reading Kristin Ross' "The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud
and the Paris Commune"

& also finally reading David Larsen's "The Thorn" (late to the party,
but what a party it is)

Tim Dlugos "A Fast Life"

Joseph Bradshaw's new poems (and everyday awesomeness)

Where Eagles Dare

Masha Tupitsyn's "Beauty Talk and Monsters"

Susan Sontag's "On Camp"

Paul Verhoeven & John Carpenter

Monica Peck's "The Pyrrhaiad"

Terius Nash's "1977"

Samuel R. Delany's "Heavenly Breakfast"

Ursula Le Guin's "The Lathe of Heaven"

all the lovely Millay Colony people

"Einstein on the Beach" at BAM

Margaret Glaspy covering "Ex-Factor" at the Rock Shop in Park Slope

Bernadette Mayer's "Sonnets"

Vanessa's Dumplings in Chinatown

Autre Ne Veut at PS1

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum (and gainful employment that
doesn't eat away at my soul)

Erykah Badu getting me through my last few months in Massachusetts

Finally moving to NYC

Writing out this long ass list and realizing how much and how many i
have to be thankful for

2012 DISINHIBITIONS: MIRANDA MELLIS

"Urgent Debt Tour" detournement of Richard Serra show by Cassie Thornton, SFMOMA, January

"Market Fitness" performance by Christian Nagler at Carville Annex, San Francisco, February

Alice Notley at AWP, Chicago, March

Table X/Y AWP offsite party & reading experiment, Red Rover, March

Beethoven sonatas at the SF Conservatory, San Francisco, March

Juliana Snapper, audience participation imago opera improvisation, The Empty Globe, Los Angeles, March

Buckminster Fuller show, SFMOMA, April

Vijay Ayer at Community Music Center, San Francisco, April

Justin Katko, Linda Russo & Matthew O'Malley on Woolsey street, Berkeley, June

Iron River Rodeo & Parade, U.P., Michigan, July

Carlotta Walls LaNier of the Little Rock Nine, at Evergreen State College, September

Salmon migration, Puget Sound, downtown Olympia, September

Art walk, Olympia, October

CA Conrad and David Wolach at Evergreen State College, November

Olympia Film Festival, Olympia Film Society, November

Warhol exhibition at the Tacoma Art Museum, December

2012 DISINHIBITIONS: ALLI WARREN

 THE YEAR IN DREAMS as told to Gmail

 I dreamed all that year; I divided intro dreamer and interpreter” – Alice Notley

I dreamt of Fiestaware
I dreamt of Frank
I dreamt you were running for president and I was your VP and you won!
and then I went out with you to do the speech
and I had one oyster
and you thought I was weird
I was trying to stay in this dingy front unit
in a pre-post-apocalyptic east bay
and everything was gravel and old wood shook by passing cars and trains our front yard was a parking lot for zombie cars you lived in the back and I wanted to talk to you about some eerie things I had seen in my space and there was this one crow that particularly freaked me out
My grandma was laying her head on a picnic table
saying she was going to die that I should say my goodbyes
it was like an amusement park and I couldn’t find my scarf

and then I fucked a boy and a girl combined I think it had two assholes

it seemed like a glimpse of a mysterious world I'd only dreamt about
I dreamt Taeo and I were on hunger games
except it wasn’t to kill each other it was for fun
I dreamt of honeybuckets and buttercups
I was a harpooner of use to bees
I dreamt Clive won a Grammy
I dreamt I got [redacted] pregnant and she was smoking
A big wave was coming to destroy the seaside town and I climbed with my "family" to the third floor of an apartment building and rode it like a merry-go-round
and then something happened
and we got in trouble from your girlfriend
I dreamt it was your poem
the font was perfect -- garamond or something
I dreamt that my cat Freddy was still alive
and I bought her a very elaborate and ornate cake
and dreamt about hamburgers and Fassbinder
giving a reading in a giant amphitheater at the edge of the ocean
My boss said I didn't have to come in to TOXIC BERKELEY today that I could work from home
You posted a picture of your back office like you'd cleaned it up or vacuumed as some sort of symbol
I dreamt of black marching bands, tile floors, AK and I robbing banks or carrying around bags of loot and scissors, a heavy wood cabinet, and I left my bra on a bench and when I came back to retrieve it an actor was there, a sort of Willem Defoe?
I found a quarter on the street
and felt guilty picking it up
I dreamt of new margins
sitting on a kitchen stool at a marble counter under warm gold lights
doing a bread tasting
[redacted] was flirting with me and you interrupted!
I got really lost
down by the Oakland docks
but then found these three men and they weren’t scary
My car sort of failed, went kaput and you and I and Brandon were somehow locked up on the side of the road together, handcuffed
I was at some sort of festival / prison camp / revival
and you kindly gave me a sack of weed
and a few bumps of cocaine
I was wearing a life vest
I hung out at a party for hours with ADELE
You lived in this elegant apartment and you were dressing me up in various outfits for some luncheon I had to go to and your friends kept arriving and I was running late. Your apartment was Andy Warhol's? and then you dragged me into the closet while I was wearing a burnt orange raw silk knee length skirt
I went to this restaurant
and I wanted a salad
but all they had was hamburger and pizza
and the waiter was really pushing this pizza
with dough made from watermelon?
This is like the summer camp/ing moment we've dreamed of so often!
I caught a yolk in my hand it didn't break

2012 DISINHIBITIONS: CASSIE SMITH

bookthings-

alphabet, inger christensen

the secret life of puppets, victoria nelson

deadfalls & snares (in ms), samantha giles

debts & lessons (in ms), lynn xu

remainland, aase berg

solaris, stanislaw lem

i am a very productive entrepreneur, et al., mathias svalina

the complete works of marvin k. mooney, christopher higgs

selected correspondence of kenneth patchen, ed. allen frost

a boatload of madmen, dickran tashjian

the lives and loves of daisy and violet hilton, dean jensen

i shock myself, the autobiography of beatrice wood, beatrice wood

fantasias, george egerton (mary chavelita dunne bright)

musicthings-

*the dodos

*sitting in a cafe in lincoln, nebraska and listening to the dodos while working on bookthings and sitting in a cafe in denver, colorado and listening to the dodos while writing poems for the first time in a very long time.

*seeing the dodos play and not understanding how there weren’t a hundred of them.

*my bubba and mi, how its done in italy

*murzik, into the darkness

*flying to portland to see murzik play and being one of less than ten in the audience, getting very sad about things that are not loved enough.

*sergio& odair assad, sergio & odair assad play piazzolla

*seeing the sea and cake play in portland with robert and doug mccombs was filling in on bass and remembering the show we went to ten years ago and i was outside smoking and robert ran outside to get me and we ran inside because doug mccombs was also in brokeback, a band we were sure was created for that moment.

*seeing michael hurley play a free show at the place robert and i went to one afternoon to write stories. not finishing the stories because we were excited.

*seeing agalloch play and crying at a metal show.

*seeing dead can dance play and lisa gerrard was wearing a golden cape.

filmthings-

crazy and thief, dir. cory mcabee

turkish star wars with live voice-overs and a small symphony

mister lonely

alla nazimova

the rounder comes to town, dir. adam beatty

artthings-

the electric pencil

morbid curiosity at the chicago cultural center

placethings-

the last saloon in dodge, dodge city ks

bishop’s castle, west of rye co

pioneer village, minden ne

readingthings-

100 poets at spt

matvei yankelevich and noel anderson black at colorado college

caroline bergvall and selah saterstrom at naropa

the shape of the i reading at counterpath

buuck and bhanu at naropa. becoming an honorary wolf.

2012 DISINHIBITIONS: LAURA ELRICK

Some of my favorite things this year (for The Disinhibitor):

Tan Lin: Insomnia and the Aunt
Jena Osman: The Network
Daniel Borzutsky: The Book of Interfering Bodies
Pam Lu: Pamela: A Novel
Nourbese Philip: Zong!
Aaron Kunin: The Sore Throat
Kamau Brathwaite: DS2
Cecilia Vicuña: Spit Temple
Jennifer Scappettone: Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli
Caroline Bergvall: Alyson Singes
“Rio Grande Crossing” Jason Reed
“Materiality: Mortality” Jen Hofer       
“Egg O Insomnia” a. rawlings  
Patrick Durgin, interviewed by Steve McLaughlin
Timothy Morton recordings (classes)   
Triple Canopy                                                                      
Beluga Whale Mimicking Human Speech
Sally Silvers Bonobo Milkshake at Roulette, November 2012
Julie Patton, Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, Stacy Szymaszek, Amy King, Ana Boicevic & Anne Waldman performing Cara Benson’s scoring of Anne Waldman’s Iovis at The Poets House, November 2012
Stephanie Gray at 443 PAS
Kaplan Harris “The Small Press Traffic School of Dissimulation: New Narrative,
New Sentence, New Left” at Jacket 2
What Is Called Violence, Ed. David Brazil
Lauren Berlant: Cruel Optimism
Sara Ahmed: Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
Timothy Morton: The Ecological Thought
Giorgio Agamben: The Open: Man and Animal
Sylvan Tomkins: Shame and Its Sisters, Eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank
Edouard Glissant: Poetics of Relation
Thinking about, but not reading, George Perec’s The Void
Thinking about and not yet reading Melanie Klein
The excitement generated by Franco Berardi on Uprising, Poetry & Finance (not yet having listened)
Ronnie Lynn Paterson playing Morton Feldman
Spaghetti Squash, Baked Potatoes, Apples

2012 DISINHIBITIONS: BRIAN ANG

My favorite thing of 2012 was an increasingly critical reflection of the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon’s experience as I gained distance from its explosion by its inertia, and the empowerment from being conscious of many people working toward emancipation, providing optimism toward future explosions.

Enriching to my reflection was publishing my favorite advancing politicized poetries in my magazine ARMED CELL, issues 2 and 3, with concentrations in the San Francisco Bay Area (Aaron Begg, Tom Comitta, Lyn Hejinian, Nicholas Komodore, David Lau, Maya Weeks), Vancouver (Stephen Collis, Jeff Derksen, Cecily Nicholson), and New York City (Laura Elrick, Josef Kaplan, Eric Linsker, Steven Zultanski). A reflection on its origin and continuation is forthcoming in Cordite Poetry Review, and ARMED CELL 4 will be first distributed at a reading by me, Joshua Clover, and Lyn Hejinian at Studio One Art Center in Oakland, February 1.

My primary theorizing produced by the Occupy phenomenon’s experience was elaborating a resistance to the ideologically oppressive aspects of the concept of community, seized in provisional fragments published in The Claudius App and Rethinking Marxism during Occupy’s hottest phases in early 2012, worked out publically at the University of California, Santa Cruz’s “Emergent Communities in Contemporary Experimental Writing” conference and a talk at St. Mark’s Poetry Project during Occupy’s inertia in middle 2012, and is heretofore most fully realized in “Resistance to Community Poetics,” forthcoming in a collection produced from the UC Santa Cruz conference in 2013. Crucial favorite things for this theorizing were considerations of Josef Kaplan and Stephen Collis’ poetries that I published in ARMED CELL.

Dialectically conditioning with these activities was writing my current poem, The Totality Cantos: An Investigation of Epistemological Totality. I designed a structural approach for extended creativity enabling the assimilation of any subject I’m interested in toward the politicization of knowledge’s totality and transgression of community’s subjugation. As of 2012’s end, 50 of 100 cantos are complete. Crucial favorite things for its methodological refinement were the music of Anthony Braxton, which I lectured on at the Berkeley Art Museum in March, and a no holds barred hangout with Bruce Andrews over martinis at his apartment when I was in the city for my Poetry Project talk.

2012 DISINHIBITIONS: EVAN KENNEDY

What’s Good, 2012?

·         The resurrection body.

·         Album of the Year: Perfume Genius: Put Your Back N 2 It.

·         Francis of Assisi as overturner of earthly authority.

·         Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community.

November 2: Ronald Palmer buys me a Madonna shirt!

2012 DISINHIBITIONS: CACONRAD

IS IT RUDE OF ME Michael to suggest JUPITER 88 and SEXIEST POEM??

They're not my work, it's me LOVING the work of others!!

The uncompromising genius of Rob Halpern is SEXIEST POEM.

And this is JUPITER 88.

THANKS SO MUCH AND HOPE TO SEE YOU IN FEBRUARY MICHAEL,

CA

(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((( M ))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

2012 DISINHIBITIONS: TYRONE WILLIAMS

giovanni singleton, Ascension: sparse, trenchant meditations on music, mutability and "post"-racial rhetoric.

Roma Tearne, Brixton Beach: big old fashioned historical novel culminating in the 2005 London bombings.

Judith Goldman, l.b.; or the catenaries: Think of Taylor Brady's and Rob Halpern's Snow Sensitive Skin turned inside out...

No Down Payment: it's finally on YouTube but why this underrated, early (1957) Martin Ritt film isn't on DVD is a mystery. All too apt in our housing bust era...

Dana Ward, This Can't Be Life: There's nothing else like it out there...

2012 DISINHIBITIONS: KYLE SCHLESINGER

As Long As Trees Last by Hoa Nguyen:

Seeking

Seeking to collect owed-money
is called “chasing the eagle”

Getting paid owed-money
is when it shits on you


Lost & Found III: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative: For no reason in particular I’m going to focus on trade editions this year, but I can’t help but give a shout out to CUNY’s Lost and Found Series featuring eight beautifully printed chapbooks (500 pages in all) of "original research and extra-poetic work." Check out: Langston Hughes, Nancy Cunard & Louise Thompson: Poetry, Politics & Friendship in the Spanish Civil War (Anne Donlon, editor); Lorine Niedecker: Homemade Poems (John Harkey, editor); John Wieners & Charles Olson: Selected Correspondence (Parts I & II) (Michael Seth Stewart, editor); Diane di Prima: Charles Olson Memorial Lecture (Ammiel Alcalay and Ana Božičević, editors); Edward Dorn: The Olson Memorial Lectures (Lindsey Freer, editor); Michael Rumaker: Selected Letters (Megan Paslawski, editor); Letters to & from Joanne Kyger (Ammiel Alcalay and Joanne Kyger, editors).


Druckwerks: 40 Years of Books and Projects by Johanna Drucker published by the Center for Book & Paper Arts at Columbia College in conjunction with a traveling retrospective of Johanna’s artist’s books. Includes contributions by Rosmarie Waldrop, Steve Woodall, Steve Clay, Betsy Davids, Charles Bernstein, Craig Dworkin, Kyle Schlesinger, Mira Schor, Marjorie Perloff, Brad Freeman, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Darren Wershler, Steve Tomasula, Pattie Belle Hastings, Tate Shaw, Joan Lyons, Jena Osman, Susan Bee, Clifton Meador, Emily McVarish, Jerome McGann, & Janet Zweig. As if that weren’t enough, Brad Freeman printed a striking facsimile edition of Johanna’s early masterpiece, From A to Z (1977), a meta-book originally printed at the West Coast Print Center that was composed (that is, written and typeset) using every sort in 48 drawers of type only once. This completely integrated work of art tells the heavily codified story of the emergence of the Bay Area Language poetry scene, and this durable reprint is now widely available for the study, scrutiny, and amusement of another generation. Pick them both up at:


This Can’t Be Life by Dana Ward: Typesetting poetry is a form of reading, textual engagement, unlike any other. I’m tempted to say ‘deeper’ and that’s not quite right, but I will say that you commit it to memory. Would anyone like me to recite a passage by Dana Ward? Great first ‘book-book,’ as they say in the industry.


Alpha Donut by Matvei Yankelvich: Shorter works culled from a substantial period of time, this book was published by Lewis Warsh’s United Artists, and to me represents an important connection between New York poets of two generations. And the book’s getting some good press! See: Matvei @ PennSound; Alex Estes @ The Brooklyn Rail; John Olson @ Tillalala Chronicles; Publishers Weekly; Michael Gushue @ Open Letters Monthly.


Nervous Device by Catherine Wagner: (an excerpt)

Chicken

A poem goes to the other side. It’s different there, but that’s not why I wrote it. There’s all there is, in the chicken joke. Where are you going with this.


Waging Heavy Peace by Neil Young: Who would have imagined that this nonlinear memoir by the godfather of grunge would be so funny? Toy trains, electric cars, Ontario, California, cocaine, divorce, organic food, ranches, rain, pure tone, and guitars.


Bean Spasms by Ted Berrigan & Ron Padgett with drawings by Joe Brainard: Now back in print thanks to Steve Clay at Granary Books. This is a good year for those with a standing interest in Brainard’s writing and a great opportunity for the next generation to fall in love with his poetry for the first time, so be sure to add the unbelievable Collected Writings of Joe Brainard to your spring syllabus. This attractive volume brings together a slew of long out-of-print chapbooks for the first time thanks to editor Ron Padgett. Introduction by Paul Auster.


Either Way I’m Celebrating by Sommer Browning: I’d teach this terrific collection of poems and comics with the Brainard.


Days of Destruction Days of Revolt by Chris Hedge and Joe Sacco: Who says collaboration is a thing of the past? Or that it only happens online? Sacco and Hedges have teamed up for a classic investigation of people and places forgotten and abused by government and big business in America. I stumbled on this is the graphic novel section of Powell’s in Portland during my crash course this summer.


Graphic Design Before Graphic Designers: The Printer as Designer and Craftsman 1700-1914 by David Jury: Generously illustrated and well-researched history of letterpress from the author of Letterpress: The Allure of the Handmade. This handsome volume asks what every graphic designer should be contemplating: what can designers do that non-designers can’t do for themselves?

New Compline: Craig Dworkin's The Crystal Text

Before I jump into a month of uninterrupted Disinhibitions, I wanted to mention that the new Compline chapbook, Craig Dworkin's The Crystal Text, is officially ready for your minds and hearts. Printed entirely on the Heidelberg at Compline HQ, The Crystal Text is Dworkin's homage to the Clark Coolidge collection of the same name. At a reading here in the Bay Area last month, Dworkin mentioned that, after rereading, he found Coolidge's book totally different than he remembered and set out to write the poem he imagined. The result is a tightly wound syntactic puzzle that refracts and levels and refracts some more, calving into semitranslucent lyric propositions. I shouldn't have to convince you that you need this. This would make a perfect belated present for someone you haven't loved enough this year. Let Craig love them for you. 

Click the button below if you have a heart!  

2012 DISINHIBITIONS

For the past few years, I've asked a handful of friends and colleagues to send me year-end lists of their favorite things for The Disinhibitor. I'll print their responses over the month of January as a celebration of all of the amazing art we made together this past year. Feel free to send your own contribution here if you have the time/inclination. In the meantime, here's my list to start us off:

Event of the Year: The long-awaited birth of Ezra Thomas Cross! Thank you to everyone who offered their support over those first three very trying months!

Most inspiring poetry activities of the year (in no particular order):
Thom Donovan, Sara Larsen, and Suzanne Stein at Small Press Traffic
Craig Dworkin and Myung Mi Kim at Small Press Traffic
Jackqueline Frost and Keston Sutherland at David Buuck's place
Norma Cole and Gail Scott at the Poetry Center
Myung Mi Kim's Oppen Lecture
Jalal Toufic's Scalapino Lecture
Jasper Bernes and Jackqueline Frost at the Holdout
David Brazil, Eleni Stecopoulos, and CJ Martin at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library
Rob Halpern and CJ Martin at Woolsey Heights
Robert Mittenthal, Lauren Levin, and Steve Farmer at Woolsey Heights
The Endless Summer reading at Small Press Traffic
Brent Cunningham, Lyn Hejinian, and Travis Ortiz at Small Press Traffic
Miranda Mellis at Small Press Traffic

Music I wrote to (and commuted to!):
A$AP Mob: Lord$ Never Worry
A$AP Rocky: LongLiveA$AP
Andy Stott: Luxury Problems
Burial: Truant/Rough Sleeper
Captain Murphy: Duality
Car Bomb: w^w^^w^w
Dog Shredder: Brass Tactics
Fennesz: FA 2012
Kendrick Lamar: Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City
The Psychic Paramount: II
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe: Timon Irnok Manta
Rustie: Essential Mix
Shit and Shine: Le Grand Larance Prix
Shit and Shine: Jream Baby Jream
Silent Servant: Negative Fascination
Swans: The Seer
Tnght: Tnght
Trash Talk: 119
Vatican Shadow: Atta's Apartment Slated for Demolition
Vatican Shadow: Ghosts of Chechnya
Vatican Shadow: Iraqi Praetorian Guard
Vatican Shadow: Jordanian Descent
Vatican Shadow: Ornamented Walls

Chapbooks I read the most:
Taylor Brady, For I Know Not What I Did Last Summer (Trafficker)
Rich Owens, Clutch (Vigilance Society)
Rich Owens, No Class (Barque Press)
Craig Dworkin, nella selva oscura / in the dark wood
Crane Giamo, Gun Spread Butter
Nicholas DeBoer, various side-stapled chapbooks

Full-lengths that felt HUGE in 2012:
Rich Owens (editor), Crisis Inquiry (Damn the Caesars)
Stacy Doris, Fledge (Nightboat Books)
Rob Halpern, Music for Porn (Nightboat Books)
Thom Donovan, The Hole (Displaced Press)
Kathleen Fraser, Movable Tyype (Nightboat Books)

Books so good I published them myself:
Sara Larsen, Merry Hell (Compline)
Thom Donovan, The Hegemon Say (Compline)
Eleni Stecopoulos, Daphnephoria (Compline)
Craig Dworkin, The Crystal Text (Compline)

Manuscripts so good I plan to publish them in 2013:
Leslie Scalapino and Kiki Smith, The Animal is in the World Like Water in Water (Compline)
Jackqueline Frost, The Antidote (Compline)
David Brazil, the ordinary (Compline)
Robert Kocik, Supple Sciences (On: Contemporary Practice)

MYUNG MI KIM & CRAIG DWORKIN

I'm very excited to announce that I'm curating a special event this month featuring two of my favorite poets EVER! On Friday, December 14th, we'll have the great pleasure of welcoming Myung Mi Kim and Craig Dworkin to the Bay Area as they join us for a special pop-up Small Press Traffic reading in Oakland. Myung will be in town to deliver the George Oppen Memorial Lecture for the Poetry Center, and I convinced her to join us for a very rare public reading while she's visiting. Additionally, I promised to make Craig a chapbook if he'd book a ticket from Utah, so we'll have the rare pleasure of seeing these two powerhouses on the same evening under the same roof! Myung will (hopefully) read from her work in progress Civil Bound, and we'll launch Craig's new Compline chapbook The Crystal Text, which I'm printing now for the occasion. This is a MUST SEE event: don't miss it! And bring a few bucks to toss into the hat for SPT! Finally, please spread the word through your preferred channels as you see fit!

The pertinent details:

Craig Dworkin and Myung Mi Kim
A Small Press Traffic Pop-Up
Friday, December 14th // 7:00 pm
@ The Bay Area Public School
2355 Broadway, Oakland

CRISIS INQUIRY Editorial Statement

One last Rich Owens aside before moving on! I can't stress enough how exceptional the CRISIS INQUIRY yearbook proved, thanks to Owens's incredible editorial eye, and, as always, Rich's own critical statement is worth the price of admission alone. Read it below (in full) to whet yr. appetite, and pick up the journal here if you haven't already! I'm rereading the Keston Sutherland feature now in anticipation of a Sutherland house reading here in the Bay Area in a few weeks time (w/ the incomparable Jackqueline Frost). Send an email if you're interested (michaelthomascross{at}hotmail{dot}com). And the Rob Halpern feature is essential reading for those neck deep in Music for Porn. 
CRISIS INQUIRY EDITORIAL

Ballads

Rich Owens's third incredible book of the year, Ballads, is just out from David Hadbawnik's Habericht Press in Buffalo. It's a pretty incredible experience to see Owens perform these "songs": I remember a pretty spectacular evening in Buffalo in which Owens turned Rust Belt Books into a roiling, drunken sailor shanty with a single poem. While he sang and stomped through a ballad, I remember thinking how rare it is to see a contemporary poet mine this ground. As is true with all of Owens's critical writing, his "Working Notes on Ballad Practice" at the end of the book stands next to the work itself. Rather than poorly summarize what Owens perfectly nails, I've asked Rich to share the text in whole as a kind of preview of what to expect from the volume. I think this perfectly captures his characteristic acumen, wit, and bite:



WORKING NOTES ON BALLAD PRACTICE



I. THE MAST

The species of an eye with the neck of an owl—a circumspect specimen that carefully considers the conditions of an outcome. Respectus. The act of looking round or back, to regard or attend to with eyes. The act of looking backwards with an eye that aspires to behold the whole so that when J.H. Prynne speaks of respect it is in the interest of fresh light—of reviewing what the eyes have already seen, a music previously muted by shadows:

"Since I crossed the sea just like a ballad, with the one guarded hope, to give you this as a totally specific gesture: a respect which runs out into time like light."

So he says to Olson, redirecting his gaze, running out. There is no deference here. Only the care of eyes for the potentialities of a buried music. Like Odysseus lashed to the mast—or more appropriately, Marina’s father moving across an oceanic expanse:

"His kingly hands, haling ropes;
And, clasping to the mast, endured a sea
That almost burst the deck."

Shakespeare’s Pericles—where the ropes that secure sails to masts and ensure good voyage vibrate like the chords of a throat. And the pressures brought to bear on the deck are no different than the altitudes and depths that push the drum of an ear near to the point of rupture. The mast that thrusts up from the deck is where we assemble.


II. THE FIRE

Like sound and sense ballads circulate. And it is the circulation of air that creates the conditions for fire. Too often paper beats rock—but only so long as it stays in circulation, reified, away from the movement of the burning flames that call our attention to time. And if there is any one collection of ballads that most worked to retard the perishing instant of fire it is Thomas Percy’s 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Published in three volumes, the collection is built around a seventeenth century manuscript and intended, Percy says, “to inquire by what gradations barbarity was civilized, grossness refined, and ignorance instructed.” Although Percy’s Reliques enjoyed a wide and enthusiastic readership that included Wordsworth and Coleridge, the “ancient” folio manuscript upon which it was built remained in the possession of the Percy family and unavailable to readers for a century until, at Francis James Child’s behest, F.J. Furnivall and John W. Hales retrieved it from Percy’s descendants and prepared it for formal publication in 1868. Brought out in four volumes as Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, an opening essay contained in the second volume offers an account of the circumstances surrounding Percy’s acquisition of the manuscript. Here Furnivall and Hales quote from a note inscribed by Percy in the manuscript itself:

"This very curious old MS. In its present mutilated state, but unbound and sadly torn, I rescued from destruction, and begged at the hands of my worthy friend Humphrey Pitt, Esq. then living at Shiffnal in Shropshire, afterwards of Prior Lee near that town; who died very late at Bath; viz. in Summer 1769. I saw it lying dirty on the floor under a bureau in ye Parlour: being used by maids to light the fire."

Ignorance is instructed when unlettered, untutored servants are taught the error of their ways. Or a culture’s past becomes the infancy of its present when songs are rescued from children accused of mishandling the objects of their labor. But there are fires to build. And few know better than a servant the value of warmth and light generated by flame in a moment of bitter darkness.


III. THE MUSIC

Children love songs and in fact make them—but music properly belongs to adults. Adults are the guardians of children and their custody naturally extends to anything a child might make. In other words, employees that produce anything on company time know in advance these objects properly belong to the company. But 401(K) investment plans offer employees the illusion of ownership, suggesting workers are no longer employees but associates that now have a personal stake in the success of the companies they labor for. Apropos: the following passages from a recent exchange with Andrew Rippeon concerning lyric practice:

AR: Lyrical as an adjective, applied to the currency of popular song forms? As if popular song forms aren’t innately also lyrical? Lyrical as nothing without a direct object to modify? And I remember here Wordsworth in either his Advertisement, Preface, or Afterward to the Ballads, writing that he chooses rude or common life because invention and idiom (cult of “the new...”) are often mistaken for truly elevated experience—he calls the affectation of idiom the “hubbub of words.” So it seems like WW is trying to reduce the experiment (and I do think WW is experimental precisely in the degree to which he mobilizes folk forms, attempts various forms of empathy, and considers his use and circulation of the currency of metrical patterns...) to the lowest common denominator, to cut out Shelleyean whim and explore what remains as the possibility of lyricism.

RO: Thinking about Wordsworth and the mobilization of folk forms—that the ballad as form needs a qualifier in order to somehow recuperate or revitalize it, like the coronation of a peasant—man, my jerking knee coughs up Ives (selling insurance against the wrong disaster). In Wordsworth the modifier serves to elevate, right? I mean, everyone has an idea they know what a ballad is. It’s this degraded thing shot through with a sense of pastness, cultural infancy and a charming but sometimes dangerous rusticity that needs to be carefully framed and reigned. In the case of Wordsworth, his appeal to ballad practice—and lyric—is, like you say, considerably more complicated. In most cases ballads are nothing more than vehicles hijacked or manufactured to map a desired past onto the poverty next door—a sort of slumming that brings the black sheep of the family to the funeral that never ends. I mean, ballads are those angelic whores from the other side of town that rich men sometimes marry—but only in fairy tales (the appeal to gender is essential).

Women and children. In the cultural imaginary women are children. Like any good woman, children are pure. They are said to be what we were before the collapse, unsullied by knowing better or knowing at all. Forms are assigned to these children and sirens are the women Odysseus must delight in without being seduced by their song. He knows better.

Nor can we know how many ballads trickled down to common people from court poets through a specifically cultural form of supply-side economics. Wyatt was a poet of Henry’s court when he wrote: “Ye must now serve to market and to faire, | All for the burden for pannyers a paire.”

Or a culture’s modest past becomes the infancy of its wealthy present when children are accused of making the objects rescued through the labor of adults. Adults often play the role of rescue workers that pull bodies from under the rubble of collapse, not so much to save them but rather to preserve and memorialize. Ann Yearsley, the milkmaid of Bristol, is said to have been rescued by Hannah More. But children often know well what is worth rescuing, even when they themselves are the object of rescue. More importantly, they know what is properly theirs. If it is not theirs they actively make it their own, mutilating and defacing the objects in their possession until they can one day be restored and preserved again by adults.

Guthrie and Leadbelly often performed for children and some critics have even called attention to their child-like qualities. Here one can reasonably assume that for an adult like Robert Southey both Guthrie and Leadbelly would have been—as Stephen Duck or John Taylor were—ideal specimens of untutored genius. They certainly were for Alan Lomax. On the other hand, Bascom Lamar Lunsford—esquire, to be sure—was known to travel dozens of miles on foot through the southern Appalachians of North Carolina to collect the ballads of the people he so loved. Something like a father picking up after his children. And children are never to be trusted with large sums of money—or anything more than what they immediately need to satisfy baser but permissible appetites. Adults handle capital. But servants often know well when to start fires and what to fuel them with.


IV. THE WAR

Chanson polemique. In the ancient sense polemic—the polemical—is war and the internal contradictions at play within the frame of any ballad make of each a protracted conflict often violently disarticulated from the processes that keep them alive. Like any order of song, ballads are sites of struggle; their production and reproduction are interventions, willful or otherwise, in that struggle.

Music properly belongs to Apollo not Dionysus. Ian Hamilton Finlay knew this well when he had inscribed across the façade of his cottage home: HIS MUSIC | HIS MISSLES | HIS MUSES. Chilean soldiers knew this well when they broke the hands of Victor Jara, threw down a guitar and asked him to play.


V. THE PATHOS

Per the Greek suffering and experience are one and the same: pathos. But on the terrain of classical rhetoric pathos is neither suffering nor experience as such and is instead a species of persuasion that reproduces experience in order to carry one capable of decision or intervention into a certain condition. It is never more than one component of a much larger whole, a part among parts integrated in an overdetermined complex of ongoing processes. But it is precisely this part that moves one to give the shirt off their back against the better jury of our reason. And this can only be the work of pathological liars or what lies through the grace of a lyre—a set of strings signaling the coordinates of a distant situation. It is not the whole of a situation but a distress signal that simultaneously sounds and responds to a situation. And depending on their situatedness such signals either challenge or act in accord with other parts embedded in the whole; or like pharmakoi these signals move as slaves among criminals, heroes among rescue workers, whores among men; they are both the cause and the cure, the ochlos—at one and the same time the people and the rabble; they are the ground any successful democracy wholly depends on, wholly produces, publicly celebrates and secretly despises. These signals are the mast we assemble around.