On the eve of Halloween we’d like to welcome the extraordinary translator and poet Mark Spitzer. His long poem Demon Tool is scheduled to fall from the Ahadada presses here in Tokyo by the end of November and to arrive state-side just in time for the holiday season. Mark is known for his The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille (Dufour, 1998), Divine Filth; Lost Writings by Georges Bataille (Creation Books, 2004), and his From Absinthe to Abyssinia; Selected Miscellaneous, Obscure and Previously Untranslated Works of Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud (Creative Art Books, 2002). We’re tickled to have him. Jess

My friend and collaborator Arturas Bumsteinas was featured at the Kennedy center, Washington D.C., as part of the Sonic Circuits Festival of experimental music. His extraordinary performance of September 20, 2007, can be viewed and heard by clicking here.

The division between Jerome Rothenberg’s appreciation of Bruce Stater’s Labyrinths and “Tenatively…’s statement is not entirely clear. (There is a small line separating the two.) We thank the writer who pointed this out and will rectify the situation. Jess

Arthur Rimbaud died May 30, 1891. Aged 37.
Herman Melville died September 28, 1891. Aged 72.

If there is an afterlife to contain them…

We received a warm e-mail today from our friend Tim Green, editor of a magazine called “Rattle”. Tim addresses us right off the bat as Jesse, and in farmiliar tones invites us to download his magazine, stop by when he’s workshopping through New York state, etc., as if we were good friends, albeit separated tragically by time and distance. The e-mail is newsy, but it lacks one thing: there is no real invitation for us to similarly share our good news with our fellow editor Tim. In fact, Tim goes on as if he and “Rattle” were the only game in town. Then Tim ends our tete-a-tete with this disclaimer: PS. You find yourself on this email list because you have an entry in our database — mostly [sic] likely you’ve submitted work in the past, which we feel implies an interest in the magazine. At RATTLE, we believe in privacy, and are very aware of the ethics of unsolicited advertising. We will never buy, sell, or exchange any contact information, for any reason, nor will we use this list more than four times per year. However, if you’d like to remove yourself from this list at any time, don’t reply to me, simply send an email to unsubscribe@rattle.com and your email address will be stripped from our database.

Indeed, I suppose we’re really not supposed to reply to Tim. We did, however, informing him of all the good things happening at Ahadada Books and to the people involved and inviting him to find out about us.

I believe that If Tim wants to tell us about his enterprise in so fond and informal a manner, let him write a personal note to me–a REAL NOTE–and not insult us–and presumably others–with spam pre-programmed to ape the sounds of real human caring. Quite frankly, we don’t recall sending a thing Tim’s way, but if we did we heard nary a peep from Mr. Green or Rattle about it. Another sign, we guess, that Tim really cares about his good friend Jesse.

At about the same time that Dan was apparently meditating on the hyphens in Yoko Danno’s text, my experience of Ahadada Books was quite other: I was riding the over-crowded Tokyo subways with one pack (50 copies) of Burton Watson’s The Late Poems of Lu You slung over my shoulder in a large sack. It was an exercise in patience as well as a great little work-out. The good news of that book, as well as that of the Elizabeth Smithers chapbook is set to go out by Monday’s post. The Japan Times and the Yomiuri already have their review copies. Exciting times have begun. We hope that the next exciting news Dan posts is that Yoko Danno’s Kojiki is finally at press. At that time I’ll light off so many fireworks here in Japan, the happy sound will be heard in Burlington and beyond. Jesse

Hey all— throught you would find the following post (from my personal blog) of interest, as it is certainly ahadada related!

Of primary interest to me, as of late, is the use of the hyphen-particularly as it relates to foreign words (especially Japanese)-as we work through Yoko Danno’s translation of the Kojiki. I prefer to use them only where it is established convention to do so or where omission would result in ambiguity or confusion. My mantra: when in doubt, leave it out!

Anyway, check out the rest of the post here. The original Quill & Quire blog post can be found here.

The printer did a great job! Tomorrow I’ll have lunch with Burton and show him the new book. I’ll also get a few copies of Elizabeth’s books in the mail. Not a bad day at all! Jess