Unrelated Triad

Visual Preface:


Abraham Lincoln.

I. The Chinese New Year This Year: There is something happening soon, a sounding. It is part two of what is known as Painted Faces. It involves several associates of The Corresponding Society, viz. Robert Snyderman, Tallon, and Matthew Daniel and: some bells attached to a rake and a flautist with an impressive beard. There will probably be other features of interest besides. I believe it is related to the Chinese New Year. Here is a video provided by Helen Wu to shed more light:


Dreamscape - dream and escape from helen wu on Vimeo.


Here is information to guide you in attendance:

Painted Faces (Part II)
Location: 14 Bowery (near Pell St), 4th floor
Date: 23 January
Time: 8pm-10pm
Suggested Donation: $3
After party: Bar 169, 169 East Broadway (near Rutgers)

II. Correspondence No. 2 Status: As we the editors of this journal go about our daily business, we have developed, some of us, a tendency to perk up and blurt to somebody in the room, “This issue is superlative.” We are all pleased with the shape of the thing, the quality of the work, et cetera, and await trying to figure out how to share, disperse, get rid of the published result. Correspondence No. 2 is being carefully prepared by a tireless team of editors and will be available within a month or thereabouts (maybe a little more/less). This time we had to make sacrificial cuts, even with material we felt strongly about, to manage a length under our decided limit of two hundred pages. (Ergo, the artistry in number 2 is of a condensed, extra-strength formula.) The range of work, consistent muscle, as well as especial concern for essays and translations, and the inclusion of hybrid forms --- all contribute to something with an atypical constitution for a biannual literary journal, as far as I am qualified to say so. More re that later. The book will be available through our online store, mail order, and whatever booksellers we manage to contact. (An aside: Adrian informs me that the first issue is now at Powell’s of Portland, Oregon, but stock dwindles.) We are planning new events and convergences to correlate with the release of our sequel. That’s the status as she is.

III. Frowning American New Year 2009: In California, at least on the television channel that was incidentally being broadcast in the room I was standing in, a taped rerun of the New Year’s celebration in New York’s Times Square was presented for those in less fashionable time zones. I attempted to discern whether this trick of mechanical reproduction rendered the spectacle any more inauthentic, but I interrupted myself by spilling wine on myself. Here’s a cute supplement to the previous entry re my visiting San Francisco, some real bloggy content: a photographic document, provided to me by friendly Richard Loranger, of inexplicably dour countenances together in poet Joie Cook’s living room on New Year’s. I don’t know why two of us appear so frowningly --- it’s unrepresentative of the night’s festivities, but perhaps evinces the poetic despair we carry always within us.


Pictured: Lonely Christopher, Kathleen Wood, Richard Loranger, styrofoam cups. Photo attribution unavailable.

Popular Postscript: Obama!