Jesse Glass at Omokage-do, Komaruyama Park, November 3, 2005, the village of Issa Kobayashi, a haiku poet. Issa Kobayashi was born in Kashiwabara, Shinano, in 1763, and died there in 1827. Kashiwabara is now part of Shinano-machi (Shinano Town), Nagano Prefecture.

Just back with the kids from seeing this delightful film. What I liked best was the telling of the Corpse Bride story by the cabaret-style skeletons, and the rollicking humor of it all. Burton’s use of folkloric motifs and just plain myth is refreshing in a time of slam bam mindless sfx for kids. I counted six (at least) of Sith Thompson’s categories at play in the film and there are probably many more. See how many you can identify!

When I was twelve years old I was fascinated by the idea of perpetual motion–and was particularly attracted to the old accounts of the Bessler Wheel. I corresponded with a cadre of perpetual motion, star drive and gravity wheel inventors, including one gentleman who produced a zine devoted to perpetual motion and free energy. Of course I used my pocket money to subscribe to his effort, aptly titled The Journal of Perpetual Motion. I do not now recall this gentleman’s name, but in the sixties he had arrived at a design for a huge, self-enclosed tunnel bored in the earth with two heat converters mounted on the inside. By maintaining a continuous disparity in temperature between one side of the tunnel and the other, a wind could be generated that could be used to turn a turbine. He called this his “perpetual motion device” although now we would call it earth energy, or something of that sort. I remember that the design had been written about favorably in Popular Mechanics Magazine, and I have since seen it and variations of it many other places. Of course, I disagreed with this gentleman way back then, and pointed out that this was not “pure” perpetual motion. He agreed and invited me to write aomething for his journal. After thinking long and hard about the problem I concluded that the only “true” perpetual motion device, outside of machines that used radioactivity for their source of power, would be machines constructed in the realm of eternal mind and in the imagination. As a test of my “theory”　I began to imagine machines and attempt to keep them “running” in my consciousness,–both in my sleeping and waking moments and through all the divisions in between. I recall drawing countless little Bessler-like “machines” in my notebooks and spending the long boring hours at school imagining that they moved. I could easily visualize their parts working together and even hear the sounds they made. When I wrote a brief report about my perpetual motion idea–pointing out that these moving machines were as deathless as any shared thought–the editor of the Pepetual Motion Journal wrote back a brief, cordial note thanking me for the idea, but rejecting the article. Much later, I began to understand that these machines that I had been dreaming about–and by now I had a veritable factory humming away–had more in common with art and literature than with electric motors and steam engines and by about 14 years old I first began to construct my first “perpetual motion machines of words”–(what I first called my efforts at creating literary artifacts.) I do not know whatever happened to the inventor/editor of the Journal of Perpetual Motion and if any reader out there recognizes him through this description, please feel free to drop me a note.

Okinawa is the home of the Eat Write Cafe, a place I heartily wish actually existed in more than just a virtual sense. The website is run by poet David Allen and it features a laid-back atmosphere where you can almost hear Jimmy Buffet’s immortal “Margaritaville” playing on the juke box. So relax and knock the sand out of your shoes! Check it out at www.eatwrite.com and tell Dave I sent you.

We’re pleased to announce the release of Skip Fox’s “At That”. It’s available now from Ahadada Books and SPD. See below for ordering details.

You can download & print the press release by clicking here.

Fox, Skip
ISBN 0-9732233-6-7
?At That? by Skip Fox. 192 pages, 5.25? x 7.25? USD $16.95/ CDN $12.95

Poetry. Skip Fox, with the concern of an entomologist, presents passages sprawling and pinned in a shadow box of observations and odd lots. Framed under double glass, the mounting board of At That writhes with a cast of freaks: Ezekiel in the streets, a kitty bomb squad, sadists on steroids, the shadow of Cadmus, kingfishers, omen clad apertures of evening with cicada wings, heart attacks of clouds rolling in off the Gulf, a city mouse, spastic proctologists, and so forth, all projecting their “goods” in spate: smatterings, obsolete creeds, mordacious stumps, “furious opinions, exaggerations, fabrications,” neo-prophetic stylings, verbal molestations, elegiac mumblings, the silence above a shallow grave, etc.

Currently serving what appears to be a life sentence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Skip Fox has worked in woods, warehouses, shake and shingle mills, lumber yards, ketchup & catfood factories, mental hospitals, and so on.

Available from Ahadada Books. Click here.

Available from Small Press Distribution. Click here.

Judith Hoffberg’s Umbrella has provided a major resource for all things related to alternative and experimental art–with a special focus on artists’ books, mail art, and visual and concrete poetry–for 28 years now. The latest issue is the last before the magazine, along with its extensive archives, becomes an electronic publication only available on the net. It’s always amazed me how the editor packs the 70 odd pages of each issue with so much useful information from reviews of the latest book on Weegee and Robert Smithson to listings of one-of-a-kind journals and publications with names like Doggy Bag and Lend Me a Memory. Good stuff and we can only applaud her decision to soldier on into the electronic future.

For more information contact the editor at:

umbrella[AT]ix.netcom.com

or visit the Umbrella website at www.colophon.com/journal