D.A. Levy Lives Ellipsis Press, ND/SA, and Roof Books Authors, Celebrating Renegade Presses and Music from Jason 17Th Annual Trachtenburg
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BLACK SUN LIT 2 DOUBLECROSS PRESS 3 ELLIPSIS PRESS 4 ND/SA 5 BOOG CITY ROOF BOOKS 6 A COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER FROM A GROUP OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS BASED IN AND AROUND NEW YORK CITY’S EAST VILLAGE ISSUE 133 FREE Celebrate Five of the City’s Best Small Presses Inside in Their Own Words and Live Readings from Black Sun Lit, DoubleCross Press, d.a. levy lives Ellipsis Press, ND/SA, and Roof Books authors, celebrating renegade presses and music from Jason 17th Annual Trachtenburg. NYC Small Presses Night Bowery Sun. Dec. 15, 3:00 p.m., $10 Poetry Club 308 Bowery (@ E. 1st St.) Book Fair The East Village Info 212-842-BOOG (2664) [email protected] 3:00-3:30 p.m., 5:30-6:00 p.m. @boogcity BOOG CITY 2 WWW.BOOGCITY.COM from from from [WANTON] Meat Habitats The City is Lush with by Christy Davids by Angela Hume Obstructed Views by Greg Nissan we are taught (re)production a hook shock determines If it is you the social value of female bodies, so in the cortisol Lay and remove the scaffold, It won’t be called making I can secrete with discretion night sign But revision tills the hand warrant only instances Hedonic. It loses its loss of mating and sheer over a door scratching fraction prettiness, perpetual arousal carousel in riotous green DOUBLECROSS PRESS from xxox fm by Joshua Escobar a.k.a. dj ashtrae in the supermarket full of mistakes my dream husband motions muddy socks over his navel i gave my future to him last night from It’s no Good from Everything’s Bad Headlands Quadrats by Stephanie Young by Brian Teare I can’t claim this is a translation of Kirill’s chasing prey a kind translation of Bukowski of looping beauty from or the way Bukowski appears in Kirill’s early Meteorites poems as translated by Keith Gessen back into off-kilter wobbling by S. Brook Corfman English as Bernadette Mayer like a saucer toward It is as if a meteor is imminent. It is as if to walk but I can suggest it stasis for an hour out of a house in a pair of heels would make I watch it not stop me someone’s hero and also get me killed. It is so friends! Hold the bloody sponge up! for all as if this is not statistically unlikely, for me. It is to see! as if, what was the word the therapist used, my doublecrosspress.com sense of self was annihilated as a child. BOOG CITY 3 WWW.BOOGCITY.COM OCTOBER 2003 BOOG CITY 3 from The Maze of Transparencies Karen An-hwei Lee ellipsis In a glade • • • of luminous press Based in Jackson Heights, green bamboo, Queens, Ellipsis Press a millennial gardener named Yang me- is a publisher of from thodically readies himself for a journey innovative fiction. in search of the supreme happiness, The Dreaming Girl a quest in a cloudy maze of transpar- Roberta Allen encies dwindling in the last days of a dying empire when fragrance atomizers doubled as intelligence gathering cloud- The girl lies bits while whiffs of aromatic molecules secreted by bots drugged on morpheus on the bed, blooms guaranteed a soporific populace propped up on her elbows, looking out In the room her hair blows. Nothing of data-logged denizens. Opioid dreams the window. The window is wide open. else moves in the room. She is still sail- once made our dwellers vulnerable to The wind blows through the window. ing in that sky, but she finds it harder hallucinations, i.e. pixelated flaming The wind blows her long hair. Her hair to breathe, harder to catch her breath. out of pyrotechnics in dopamine-laced is like the waves of the sea, undulating Very soon now she will come back. It’s dreamclouds over the mezzopolis—a in the wind. inevitable. She can’t stay out there for cloudbased megacity hovering in the The sea crashes on the stones of long. Her thoughts get in the way. biomass, a swirled layer of living things deft, calloused fingers under the halo the promenade outside the window. As though some God has suddenly tamed and tagged by a layer of thinking of a soy-and-beeswax votive reeking She is not aware of the window. She is thrown a bowl of water on the world, things—while the information wars copiously of wild black cherries—evok- not aware of the room. She is out there rain crashes down, but not straight raged at various and sundry multiversi- ing the dark chocolate cherry-tortes, with that sea, with that wind, with the down. Wind carries the water, throws ties. Once upon a time, this common- amaretto cherry jams, and cherry-laden sky that hides in the blackness. the water every which way, throws the wealth of ironies was built on tranquil- black forest gâteaux which his Eurasian She understands the violence in the water in her room; soaks the pillow, lized workaholism. Our denizens of mother of nomadic Uberasian roots air. She is part of that violence, part of part of the sheet before she manages data persisted in a bog of endorphins would bake when Yang was a boy. that blackness. She screams with every to close the window. She is back now; mingled with cyberfatigue, a quagmire her face wet, her hair wet, her neck, her of data vertigo. Our perfumed gardener, Yang, is a shoulders, her chest glisten with water. After a technocracy collapse, the survivor of a digital apocalypse. Once She feels robbed by the weather. hazy mezzopolis regressed to analog upon a cloud, I accommodated Yang as She would have stayed out there with living by holistic sensory integration, a user. We’ve parted ways, in a manner that sea, with that wind a while longer. plunged into a neo-rustic, agrarian of speaking. She looks around: there is nothing of lifestyle from the days of yore: waking Or rather, I never left Yang, who interest in the room; just the usual walls at dawn to gather eggs, milk the yaks can’t log in. and floor and ceiling. and other bovine mammals like water Overlooking a 0.44 acre seaside The walls don’t reach the ceiling buffaloes or cows, or draw well water yard, blissfully immune to my pres- in the rooms of the guest house. The out of pathogen-free aquifers. (Others ence, Yang computes square roots and walls stop two feet below: there are two argue this was no regress but rather, logarithms, conversions of hexadecimal feet of open space where in the night, a homespun neophyte’s progress.) By systems with radix 16, the rise and fall the thoughts, the feelings of the guests day, Yang is a gardener whose daily of civilizations with the clack of a jade circulate and mingle in the air, affecting grind has shifted from mining clouds bead. (Byte on byte, Yang fabricated each other in their sleep without their in the lower zone of the mezzopolis to my cloudiness.) Click clack, click clack. knowing. They dream of each other but cruising skywalks in the upper bio- With a flick of his wrist, Yang reposi- forget their dreams when they awaken. sphere, once moonlighting as a vigilante tions the beads on little brass rods, tilts They awaken with thoughts not their for the junta’s fly-by-night operations his forehead to a spray of peonies on own, with feelings they never knew they on the information highway. his nightstand by the window, inhales had. They breathe each other’s breaths, Obscure patron saint of bygone lungfuls of iodized sea air, and copies share each other’s sorrows. clouds by night, Yang shuttles the beads out alphanumerals in a zone of medita- In the morning when they awak- on his jade abacus with percussive alac- tive flow. en, they will pass each other without rity, his fingers energized by a macrodi- In Yang’s seaside shanty adorned bird in her silence. The wind grows a word. Or if they talk, hello and all et of polyphenol and flavonoid-rich mi- with faiences arranged in the golden ra- stronger, tries to tear the sound from that, they will feel suddenly strange, as crogreens, i.e. pomegranate pips, leafy tio, or apart from the whims and vaga- her, but fails. Still, she lets the wind lift though they have been stolen, or else red kale, and big blackberries from his ries of our souls, does a cloudfree for- her. they will feel themselves thieves without seaside garden. Yang is a gardener for mula for happiness exist? If algorithms From the window, she can fly with knowing what it is they have taken. whom a blackberry is a blackberry and a quantify compatibility, what about those screeching birds. She can sail over When the girl awakens, she doesn’t cloud is a cloud, no more. (To lull him- maximizing happiness? Yang shuttles the city: this ramshackle city; this city of remember anything. It is as though she self to sleep at night, Yang recounts the rows of jade beads on his abacus. Is rag-covered windows and rotting wood, is alive for the very first time. There is vanishing of those clouds in the shapes happiness a state of mind that can be of peeling paint and broken porches, the sea smell of the air, the cries of the of genetically unmodified sheep.) possessed like a lepidopterist’s collec- of sagging floors and open sewers, of birds, the blue sky.