We would like to start an Ahadada Editions Drama Series and open our e-chaps up to one acts and performance texts. In addition we’re planning a contest for experimental work starting in 2010.

Our printer put the wrong ISBN number on the cover of Elizabeth Smither’s Horse Playing the Accordion and we’ve finally gotten the mistake fixed. Happy to say that the horse is now swiming in the direction of Ahadada/ West and Small Press Distribution. Expect to hear more about this fine volume in a few more weeks.

Finished watching an inspiring video on YouTube of a “Peternera”: a Flamenco performace that combines dance and an intense, but short, sung lyric accompanied by guitar. The power of this combination–but especially of the singing– almost lifted me from my seat. It also suggested to me possibilities of spoken poetry accompanied by dance. A search under “Peternera, Carlos Saura” will show you exactly what I’m talking about.

Once again, I rarely comment on politics, but after reading the latest New Yorker article on Bill Clinton’s extended, and often bizarre outbursts of non-reasoning or flawed-reasoning anger, I can think of one possible explanation, and that’s the open-heart surgery that the former president endured a few years back. During the process the heart is stopped and the level of oxygen traveling to the brain is often greatly reduced, which can cause subtle shifts in thinking ability and personality from the resulting damage to the cells. From what I understand the results in this regard are something of a crap shoot, with some patients who have gone through the procedure exhibiting little to no damage, and others clearly showing a change after recovery. Of course, it’s obvious that Bill Clinton has aged since he left the White House, and perhaps some of this inability to manage anger is the simple result of a decreased ability to manage stress (not uncommon among A-Type males as they get older); on the other hand, after watching some of the confrontations on television and on the net, and reading of others, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps the anger first arises from a lesion or series of lesions buried deep within the neurological components of Bill Clinton’s brain, and the reasons for it are consequently arrived at and applied in an increasingly bizarre and haphazard manner by the former President.