In late 2010, Sina Queyras commissioned me to contribute a guest column for her Lemon Hound blog.
Each column discusses a different concern in concrete and conceptual poetics with special attention paid to little-addressed or overlooked texts. Borges’s “The Library of Babel” provides the initial discussion point, exhibiting how each text is both a member of Borges’s nightmarish library and encapsulates it. “Pulled off my Shelves” ran for 13 weeks:
1. September 24, 2010: Alison Turnbull’s Spring Snow—A Translation (London: Book Works, 2002)
[on Alison Turnbull, Yukio Mishima, Paul Auster and The Oulipo]
2. October 1, 2010: bill bissett’s Rush: what fuckan theory: a study uv language (Toronto: grOnk / Vancouver: blewointment, nd [1971])
[on bill bissett and jwcurry]
3. October 8, 2010: “There are some punctuations that are interesting and there are some punctuations that are not.”
[on David Aylward, Sha(u)nt Basmajian, Paul Dutton, Kenneth Goldsmith, Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, herman de vries, Heidi Nelson, Scott Myles, Gary Barwin and Riccardo Boglione]
4. October 15, 2010: “Besides, it’s always other people who die”
[on Enrique Vila-Mata, Herman Melville and J.D. Salinger]
5. October 23, 2010: “Compose the Holes”
[on William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Tristan Tzara, Tom Phillips, Ronald Johnson, Austin Kleon, Jen Bervin, Elisabeth Tonnard and Janet Holmes]
6. October 29, 2010: “O, though I love what others do abhor.”
[on Ronald Johnson, Gregory Betts and Robert Fitterman]
7. November 5, 2010: “Hence latent of satisfaction, relating singing of of bunch the effect.”
[on Simon Morris, Craig Dworkin, Kenneth Goldsmith, Nick Thurston and Christine Morris]
8. November 12, 2010: “All work and no play makes jack a dull boy”
[on Phil Buehler and Jack Torrance]
9. November 19, 2010: “Have you studied the soft toes of Geckoes?”
[on Gilbert Sorrentino, William Walsh and Padgett Powell]
10. November 26, 2010: “It looks like ink spilled on paper.”
[on Dan Farrell, Craig Dworkin and Christian Bök]
11. December 4, 2010: “I cannot sleep unless surrounded by books.”
[on Parasitic Ventures Press's Lost Book series]
12. December 10, 2010: “Mother Tongue, naturally.”
[on Darren Wershler, Eugen Gomringer, Andrei Molotiu, Scott McCloud and Billy Mavreas]
13. December 17, 2010: “The library is print in its gaseous state.”
[on Craig Dworkin]
