A quick round up of some recent publications.
Mousse Magazine published a conversation between myself and Pharmako-AI author K Allado-McDowell about the work of the late great poet John Giorno — whose poetry I edited in the book Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962 – 2007. You can read it here. Included in the magazine is an excellent survey of John’s life and work, featuring many pieces from his archives. The conversation is pretty wide ranging, but there’s a focus on John’s media poetics and how poetry arises in the mind, individually and collectively. Those are the “Five Hundred Mirrors” of the title!
I have an essay entitled “The Sound of the Mandala” in the recent book edited by Haema Sivanesan, In the Present Moment: Buddhism, Contemporary Art and Social Practice, published by Figure.1/Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. The essay is a playful survey of the use of mandalas, in modern and contemporary art — with a focus on the use of mandalas as an organizing principle for sound art and music, notably in the work of Pauline Oliveros, as well as Terry Riley, Toshiro Mayuzumi and others. But the essay also tracks the history of the concept of the mandala, as it makes its way to Europe and America. via Jung, early Tibetologists and Tibetan teachers, and Theosophists — and the ways in which these framings of mandala enter the field of art. I’m proud to be in the company of Louwrien Wijers, who has done so much in terms of thinking about the possible relationships of Buddhism to art. And in the company of my friend the visual artist Chrysanne Stathacos, whose amazing rose mandalas have graced many galleries and other spaces in recent years.
I wrote the entry for “laudanum” for The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, edited by David Wondrich, and published by Oxford University Press. It’s an amazing book, a real labor of love by Wondrich, and a vast assemblage of knowledge and history concerning alcohol in its myriad varieties, one of which, it turns out, is laudanum, that tincture of opium, dissolved in alcohol, much beloved of the English Romantic writers such as Coleridge and De Quincey.
Finally I have a very short piece in Erik Davis’ wonderful new book Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium (MIT Press), which includes a long thoughtful piece by Erik on the history of the acid blotter, as well as a remarkable collection of images of specific historical acid blotters and the artwork printed onto them. Erik invited a bunch of interesting folks to write about particular images — I chose the most minimal one, the blotter with a single dot on it, and reflected a little on the mathematics of the point as the minimal unit of being — and of consciousness, particularly under the influence of LSD.
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