SMALLS is a monthly inceptual webzine hosted on the third Wednesday of each month. Incomplete and out-of-context works presented like workbooks or alluring puzzle pieces that, in theory, are to be added together to build greater wholes. If you have an interesting fragment or work in progress that you’d like included in the next issue of smalls, guidelines & deadlines below:

Text Submissions must be 500 words or less and compatible with Wordpress formatting.

Visual-media submissions must be 525 pixels wide or narrower, of any height.

Sound files must be no longer than 2 min and 30 seconds, and in mp3 format.

Works will be selected by visceral response on the part of the editors, regardless of their subject matter, but particular focus will be on Seattle, the art shows & poetry readings that happen there, and small press books.

Please send submissions as links or attachments to will [at] pilotbooksseattle [dot] com by midnight on Wednesday, September 22nd. They will be published the following week, on September 29th.

• Ch Baudelaire

“The attempt to do anything major now in a world full of major shit going down just seemed idiotic and really egotistical.”

• Matt Browning

“History turns on small events; an emphatic hit delivered with such sincerity, and we are suddenly resonant, as though ferning (better take it easy here), as though applauding ourselves. Unexpectedly, the furies have been released, and for our time they will flourish on ice. Now is a critical match, one more beginning of real social upheaval, an enthusiastic burst forward bent, So that now the line, this foreighn red rigid line is unbearable and without jurisdiction, intolerable, barbaric, a prototypical pretext. There can be no neutrality, so that’s the way it is, this perpetual combat incarnate a form of revenge. By knocking him out, you know. A lot of Stupid things are going to happen from now on.”

“Ben Hur under the bed. He so yearns for saucy. Plinth of the state – the fashion for huge.”

• Nancy Shaw & Catriona Strang

[scroll down for english translation]

“ГОЛЫЙ ЗАВТРАК”. ПРЕМЬЕРА

се – завтрак на траве он голый
          он в складчину раздет
за обе щеки ветреную голень
          уписывает менуэт

в воображении и только
          как посох тросточка цветет
лицо присыпанное тальком
          вакханки бородатый рот

и в хороводе мусикийском
          приняв на посошок
так и стираешься с возлюбленной
                    актриской
в астральный порошок

и – кончено погасшим стэком
          в партере уголь ворошить
а мондриану двух веков на стыке
          парадный саван шить

здесь ноготок его прошелся в лайке
          а все же есть
раз выстроилась по линейке
          свалявшаяся мира шерсть

так в оркестровом свальном мраке
          теперь станцуемся мил-друг
прилаживая мертвой Эвридике
                    надраенный мундштук

—-

NAKED BREAKFAST. A PREMIERE

this is breakfast it is naked
            it is nue & nu
the minuet stuffs its cheeks
            with a flighty shin

in the imagination only
            a walking stick blooms like a staff
a face powered by talc
            a bearded mouth of a bacchante

& in the roundel of the muses
            having imbibed one for the road
you rub together with your beloved
            actress
into astral powder

it’s time to stop with a cold poker
            to ransack dead embers
mondrian must tailor the dress
            shroud on the clasp of two centuries

his kid-gloved nail left a trace here
            but there still is
the tousled wool of the world
            once it lined up along the ruler

so in the orchestra’s indifferent dark
            we’ll work on our pas de deux
to the lips of dead Eurydice
                         affixing a polished cigarette-holder

-Aleksandr Skidan, from Red Shifting (Ugly Duckling Presse)

Skidan with Carla Badillo Coronado

Apropos of appropriation
I take a lyric from your limit
Please excuse the plums from your fridge
They were so old I had to throw them out

Vis-à-vis Joshua Clover
Is it history or capitalism that enters
That phone booth     or just Batman and Robin
Fluttering through centuries of cartoon accumulation

It’s thus that immediacies visionary gleam
Reams of unwrit paper     porch junk     a pack
Of Camel cigarettes     (by Benjamin’s other hand)
The free fountains of Portland forever flowing

Some freighter stopped by urban docks
To watch containers fill with products
Was I born in a half-savage country     out of date?
Allow me my accelerated grimace     my obstinate isles

—

for Andrea Actis

Perhaps it’s a country you remember
It’s exhaustion and its fish grottos
The time it takes to bait its bears
Space you crossed escaping bylaws

North of attention but south of
Their tents on the hills of incremental invasion
No other relation than economic between us
Mi casa     su casa     mon payee

I love a wall     doesn’t build us
This world gone 4×4ing over wrack and
Ruin no barricades built of asphalt
Bio born to break or better bend

Perhaps it’s furtive human help
A hand held out to cavernous combs
The hone in that land we milked
Hoping for the opening of others’ eyes

-Steve Collis, from 4×4, published in Peaches & Bats 3. [Steve will be reading at Pilot tonight at 7PM]

www.sorry.com

My sincere apology
I repeat, I was
Roving very fast
Set my pulse
To obsolesce

I’m the one with no soul
I told you from the start
How this will end
I lament my fate
As sentimental hate

Love stops innocence
Journey and curve
The apology, you answer
I cannot talk more than usual
When clouds deny twilight
To close the distance
Measured in lies

Despite the times
I will illuminate
Weeks of withering
Witnessed in every single line
We look the same
We talk the same
My dear supporters

The purchaser sells the sky
Is this progress
You know it’s all
Squandered
As a consequence
You brighten up
That I thought
You would flatter me.

Dear Pacific,

I send you this letter the night before my return to sojourn on your shores. Which means, of course, with a border crossing imminent, my thoughts turn to politics. What to make of so manylives crossing paths in the wake of liquid capital?

Forgive me but I feel I haven’t yet exhausted you enough, so this letter is rather lengthy…

The other day I took the advice of one of your emissaries. A resident of Portland, he grew up in Cape Cod and Brooklyn. He claims that the best burger in the city, perhaps the world, is at Fanelli’s on the corner of Prince and Mercer. While waiting for my cheeseburger something unexpected happened: I thought I saw an apparition of another one of your emissaries so that this associative network (the one who suggested the bar, the one imagined in the bar, neither of  whom know each other) seemed indistinguishable from the dimmed halo light of turn-of-the-century fixtures. I eavesdropped on barflies who argued whether Jersey City was a more vital part of NYC than Staten Island. There you were dear Pacific in all that commotion as phantasmagoria. In the middle of SoHo I sat in that dimly lit bar whose interiors quite possibly dated from the late nineteenth-century and which on your shores would have looked mannered. But not so here. New York has its own vanities to groom, which, like all vanities, I love. Outside high fashion and cash streamed through streets once peopled by performance artists and minimalists.

You have a strange habit of insinuating yourself in unexpected places (kind of the way Ithink of a friend who no longer lives here, and whom I haven’t seen in years, whenever I am in the Times Square Subway Station as if something happened to her there).

On another evening I attended another reading by Lynne – at the Ding Dong, a bar in the Upper Westside not far from my apartment in Harlem. A singer and bassist, her husband David Hofstra, accompanied. The dingy bar fit the swooning accordion music well. While we visited before the reading (I was reminded what a generous and truly awesome person she is), she spoke of her unease at becoming the “Native Informant” of the downtown scene of the eighties. I associate Native Informants with the erroneous belief that cultures are about to dies, people such as George Hung.

So what is it, dear Pacific? And what is it about your politics? More than a mixed city, New York is a separate city where the differences cross paths in marginally public spaces; where people don’t so much connect as brush against each other, warm acquaintances, trading business cards or insults; where artifice, the layers up9on layers of subway tracks, are as much archeological as they are contemporary; where restaurants turn over more quickly than outer-borough trains move. In the middle of observation, I’d like to complicate these myths a little; it’s my skeptical nature. i admit, dear Pacific, it suits me, and there is so much by which to be seduced here. The numbers guarantee that, but what to do in a city that so evidently embodies the rapid whims of capital? How do I catch your drift? Here even the projects have become become solvent: first the East Village’s Study Town, which sold for 5.4 billion dollars; now Starlett City, in Jamaica Bay, Brooklyn, will go on auction next month, and is estimated to sell for over a billion; while East New York has been reported to become the “next Bed-Stuy” (which is also gentrifying) with a 1,000-unit conversion in the works. (NB: I am not supposed to mention The Bronx.)

One of your emissaries thinks of this as a place to come and get money, socialize, then leave. Geographically New York was the centre of the merchant trade of the nineteenth century – located as it was between the industries of the north, the agriculture (viz., slaver0 of the south and the Eerie Canal to the west. It retains that centrality, though money moves less predictably, and nothing so fickle as geography can make a city. We attended a secret party in the Time Warner Building for now publicly-known ends, an award, though at the time a secret so that even I didn’t know what I was attending just that I was to show up on the fifth floor of the Time Warner Building, at “Jazz at Lincoln Centre.” That evening I found myself aboveground at columbus circle, a rarity though I transfer there daily, amoung American artists all of whom received large arts grants. We were welcomed by Winton Marsalis, hosted by Leonard Nimo, and then watched Meredith Monk, a composer, Teri Rofkar, a traditional weaver of Tlingit blankets, lourdes Perez, a Latina folk singer, and Roland K. Brown, a coreographer perform against the floor-to-ceiling glass backdrop that looked onto Coloumbus Circle, Central Park, and Midtown, the skyline uselessly beautiful, with the traffic of Columbus Circle reflected on the surface of the window.

But, really, all I want to do, beside tell you about these events, is describe the staircases in my subway stations quick-footed when they catch my eye as I rush from one place to another. I see those stairs everyday. But the simplest descriptions escape me.

And so with these thoughts and more, I will take a Brooklyn-bound A Train to JFK, moving under-ground, and soon I will be flying over the continent, dreaming of the kinetic elite, breathing recycled air, without enough money to purchase a private dinner. I will touch down on your shores at SeaTac to cross the border northward.

So tell me, dear Pacific, about my Canadian troubles. What the hell is Steven harper doing? Ignoring the Kyoto Accord, declaring Quebec “a nation within a nation” (a move I support but don’t trust the intentions of), attending Felipe Calderon’s inauguration, getting snubbed by Hu Jintao at the Asia Summit, sending more troops to Afghanistan, and cutting funding to the Canada Council? Has Canada gone mad? Who can recallits history of resistance? I was relieved to read that parliament rejected harper’s attempt to overturn the law sanctioning gay marriage.

And what about Vancouver, my littoral city, Vancouver with its architectural surfaces akin to fake-and-bake tanning? A fellow student, a young architectural historian, brilliant and queer (as one of your emissaries once wrote, “an architect or a fag, either way a fellow traveler”), gave a presentation in a seminar about the underlying metaphors of cosmetic surgery, viz. biopolitics, in urban renovations in the West Village. This, I sadly say, has been the only bright spot in my semester of tedious conservative classes and classmates. But I digress. What about my city, Vancouver, with its fake skin crackling with the movement of capital?

Is this where politics meets the painful lyricism of your address (which, in fact, has no clear location)? The world seems increasingly decentralized, or rather the world’s decentralization is more and more evident, so that this address, vague and multiple as it is, is the only thing, the only form that makes sense. What kind of demos is this? I’m getting dizzy.

Spinningly yours,

___________

PS – since my unfortunate downgrade to an iPod Shuffle, my thoughts also, more vainly, have turned to the coming boredom of a cross-continental travel hampered by limited music. I have heard the truism that if you’re bored in New York, it’s your fault. I must respectfully take issue with this claim not that I have had the time to be bored myself, but I find the assumption somewhat irksome. First, it ignores the possibilty that boredom can be a welcome thing, an intimacy: an exasperated comment shared with a stranger on a delayed subwa; moments of insomnia watching nighttime shadows on the wall; waiting on a Manhattan-bound subway platform in Brooklyn well past midnight. Aoll of these produce boredom but none of them bother me. Second, it assumes that a city, the situation regarding a specific city alone, can provide everything. I don’t believe this.

As myjourney to SeaTac, which will invite its own forms of boredom, equally welcome, a volume or two of Proust should do the trick.

-Aaron Peck, from Letters to the Pacific (Publication Studio) [Aaron will read at Pilot Books at 8PM tonight.]

-Donato Mancini, ‘Jazzercize Dance of Hope’, from Aethel [Donato will be doing a residency from noon till 8PM today]

SAY NO LAME!

Say no lame! Say we care. Terror can’t tell
and bears a crown in the kitchen, may we?
Who cares: cunt can’t battle, key won’t tear.
Ugly decay, care for Pa and tell, we lonely.
So jail men care, met a lavish man, met a landlord.
(Eggpisode loiter ha! Advance don’t at all, assuming mellow)

Me, countless, out to tear. Sane no, lend me.
Say I can’t rain, end me.

At least sit well, we command:
Men say he but tally saying no, lame!
Who can respond. None say none! My wind, way low.
Lie, Egg, more lonely and bare, a callous lock.
Truly true Lass pause and care.

Allow oat to chant:
Let me say align, aligh,
Titan of Adam, you seem dense.
Let me say in-law, in-law
I won’t lay an eggy egg.

- Don Mee Choi, from the long poem Manegg a homophonic translation of Manteg by Monchoachi, collected in The MORNING NEWS Is EXCITING (Action Books)

I was a doctor, and sick, and really desperate. The only thing that did any good was the most repetitious insistence on every one of my faults, which brought effective relief. I said “look at my ugly legs” though some would say they weren’t ugly at all. I said “what a cunt!” “How demanding!” and there was a trace of truth in that, and yet people called me Un-American. I could not even tell them apart, what I was and what they scorned me to be. I had full round breasts but deemed myself fat as a pig or I had slack breasts and refused myself a bra; I was articulate but spat at myself stuck-up and bitchy; I was simply good but labeled myself fool. I waddled and took myself out walking. I had crooked teeth and told myself a funny story, I had a sorrowful tale to flood my watery eyes. I surprised myself many a morning when I wasn’t ready, I did this on purpose to catch myself when I wasn’t expecting a call, I caught myself smelly and ugly, with bad breath and bad hair and a bad complexion, and saw more to myself that way than I’d ever seen. They called me a critic and meant I was a rat, they called me a witch and knew not what they meant, and that helped me to see I had not been mistaken. I came unforeseen, victim and failure and danger and vixen and fraud. Because there hides the essence of love.

-Linda Russo, from Mirth (Chax Press) [Linda Russo will be reading with Sarah Mangold at Pilot Books at 7PM tonight]

{a new newer sentence and back}

potentially genetic saline
miracle of layered
hair see they
wear gloves to
the chalkboard some
people say a
cucumber tastes better
as a pickle
it’s all foxes
and lilies well
recently flight attendants
and the year
abroad the year
in the midwest
the year in
India Prague year
of other and
then other here
of course grooming
and newspapers staggers
it happens her
market meals and
political debates reciting
as if that’s
a solution her
own circle that one

-Sarah Mangold [Who reads tonight with Linda Russo at 7PM at Pilot Books]