Books

French/English paperback with essays by Raymond Bellour and Laurent Roth on Chris Marker's Immemory. 

'Chris Marker's CD-ROM Immemory is most easily imagined as a digitally stored attic room, divided into zones of memories. Those zones show (fragments of) photographs, engravings, paintings, films, texts, edited or annotated, which are plotted along a number of virtual trajectories that one can traverse: Le Voyage, Le Musée, La Mémoire, La Poésie, La Guerre, La Photo, Le Cinéma.

The central question, borrowed from Marcel Proust, is also the heading of the La Mémoire section: "Qu'est-ce qu'une madeleine?" What charges something with the affect of memory? Why is that one detail, that one book, poem or painting the emotional and essential among all others?' (Witte Raaf 1999)

Yves Gevaert publisher, co-published with the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

In The Third Body, the poet, novelist, feminist critic, and theorist Hélène Cixous interweaves a loose narrative line with anecdotes, autobiography, lyricism, myth, dream, fantasy, philosophical insights, and intertextual citations of and conversations with other authors and thinkers. Cixous evokes the relationship of the female narrator and her lover, a relationship of alternating presences and absences, separations and rejoinings. This relationship assumes protean forms within a complex web of writing, creating a third body out of the entwined bodies of the narrator and her lover. 

Hélène Cixous is a professor emerita of literature and founder of the Centre d'études feminines, Paris VIII. Her numerous books include Stigmata, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, The Newly Born Woman, The Laugh of the Medusa, and Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory. In 2000, a collection in Cixous' name was created at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence is a rich consideration of the strategies of poetry, and the similarities between early Zen thought and some American avant-garde writings that counter the language of determinateness, or conventions of perception. The theme of the essays is poetic language which critiques itself, recognizing its own conceptual formations of private and social, the form or syntax of the language being syntactically impermanence. 

Whether writing reflexively on her own poetry or looking closely at the writing of her peers, Leslie Scalapino makes us aware of the split between commentary (discourse and interpretation) and interior experience. The poetry in the collection is both commentary and interior experience at once. She argues that poetry is perhaps most deeply political when it is an expression that is not recognized or readily comprehensible as discourse.

It's summer in New York City and the streets are sizzling. Below 14th Street the girls at the Kitsch-Inn are hard at work on their new lesbian version of A StreetCar Named Desire. As the temperature rises, lesbian-at-large Lila Futuransky is looking for adventure, with her keys in her pocket and a copy of On The Road in her hand.

A fast-paced, spirited romp through politics and sexuality, Girls, Visions and Everything offers a funny, affectionate portrait of a group of struggling young artists trying to find meaning in their changing world.